12 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



on." Rightly he calls the change brought about a " fundamental " 

 change. It is that indeed, and its social side almost overtops the 

 economic. The rural citizen has his own importance to the State, 

 his power and his rights restored to him. In the consciousness of 

 his altered position he is breaking down old barriers. He is asserting 

 his claim to a share in the possession of the land. We cannot, if 

 we would, hold him back from this. We should be fools if we 

 continued to try to do so. For he can, with his vigilance and his 

 labour, his meticulous care and his minute observation, stimulated 

 and impelled by his own interest, get more out of the land — alike in 

 produce, in value, in benefit to the community, under the aspect of 

 both trade and healthy population, to feed our towns as well as 

 his native village community and in happiness — than its present 

 semi-monopolising holder. But we cannot hold him back. He has 

 grown too strong. He himself wants, as well as to share in the 

 occupation of the land, also to help in repeopling it in his own way. 

 We have done something towards such repeopling. But we have 

 hitherto done it only in a patronising and gubernatorial way. We 

 have invited people to settle, we have endeavoured to attract 

 them to the land by material inducements. Our rural man himself, 

 who knows better than we, can explain to those whom we would 

 induce to settle, where and by what means good is to be got out of 

 the land, and is likely to do the thing much better. We are holding 

 out inducements — at public expense — to newcomers, more specific- 

 ally to discharged soldiers, to settle upon the land, of the proper 

 cultivation of which the majority of them probably know nothing. 

 One would, indeed, wish many to settle and to prove good, useful 

 and — this is important — permanent colonists — not such independ- 

 able birds of passage as Sylla's and Caesar's ex-legionaries, planted 

 on the land in Italy, with the same design, proved to be, or the 

 military settlers of only a few years ago on the island of Hokkaido. 

 However, a penny saved is even better than a penny got. Our 

 main object, I take it, should be, apart from attracting newcomers, 

 to try to keep those on the land who are there already — in Dean 

 Swift's words — admonishingly addressed to ladies on the look-out for 

 husbands — to be careful to construct " cages " rather than " traps." 

 If we can only keep the majority of those who are born on the land 

 on it, to spend their lives there, because they take a delight in it> 

 and amid surroundings which are familiar to them, and in occupa- 

 tions which possess the same merit of familiarity, in dwellings that 

 mean abiding homes for their families, we shall have quite enough 

 population to repeople our land, and to repeople it to better effect 



