THE CALL FOR RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 3 



its manly occupations and enjoyments, its social pleasures and 

 cheering intercourse, and its happy freedom. 



But look down at the other end of the social scale ! There has 

 been long protracted misery there, denial of what Thiers termed 

 " the necessary liberties," drudgery, hopelessness, a dreary look-out 

 into a future which would bring no relief. Hence, as a natural 

 consequence, that regrettable falling-off complained of before our 

 last Royal Commission on Agriculture in our rural labourers' 

 " efficiency " and productiveness, under which our agriculture is 

 found to suffer. You cannot get the best possible work out of 

 worn-out creatures. You cannot look for a real will to work in a 

 man to whom all prospect of future improvement of his condition is 

 barred. It is a man's spirit which produces a will and capacity to 

 work. Place a dead weight on a spring, and its elasticity and 

 resiliency will be gone. 



In respect of these things, we have maintained a position different 

 from that of all nations round about us. There has been poverty 

 elsewhere, backwardness, trouble, distress. But there has not been 

 hopelessness to equal ours. Everywhere there has been a road left 

 open to the rural toiler by which he might, if fortune should favour 

 and he had the stuff in him, advance to better things. Once serfdom 

 was abolished, he ceased to be that " vocal instrument " (instru- 

 mentum vocale) that the Romans frankly and expressively called 

 him. He acquired a house of his own, a " castle," in which to be 

 " master " — like the French charbonnier — in which to find a firm 

 footing, as on that " standing ground" which Archimedes postulated, 

 from which it would be possible for him to " move the earth." The 

 French peasant had the " marshal's baton " in his rural knapsack, 

 as well as his piou-piou brother in his military " sac," as a possible 

 attainment. The German labourer had the way always open to him 

 to the position of a yeoman. The Belgian, the Dutch, the Danish 

 were in a similar position. In the United States, a high authority 

 points out, it is quite understood that the farmer of to-day is the 

 labourer of yesterday, who " started in " with nothing but his arms. 

 In Belgium, at our Workmen's Compensation Congress of 1897, our 

 chairman, M. Beernaert, remarked : " How many are there among 

 us whose forbears only a few generations ago were not in the ranks 

 of labourers ? " 



And if there was hope and comparative liberty, there was also 

 joyfulness. Country life distinctly had its pleasures, pleasures which 

 did not cloy, and in which there was no root of mischief, genuinely 

 human, innocent recreation, such as Sterne has depicted as having 



B 2 



