2 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



It is with truth, accordingly, that President Roosevelt said in his 

 "Message" quoted on the title page, that agriculture cannot be 

 judged to be in a satisfactory condition without satisfactory country 

 life to form a congenial frame for it. 



Now, on no point of the whole of our social and economic system, 

 so it will have to be admitted, is reconstruction or reorganisation — 

 and, as an avenue to it, inquiry — more urgently called for on the 

 whole breadth of its extension than on country life in the sense in 

 which Mr. Roosevelt spoke of it. The present condition of that 

 " life " is universally recognised as unsatisfactory. There is no 

 unity about it, no satisfactory interconnection among parts, no 

 substance for contentment, nor any immediate prospect of such. It 

 almost recalls Saint Paul's melancholy description of the whole 

 creation as " groaning and travailing in pain together," waiting " to 

 be clothed upon" — with hopeless, prospectless labourers, farmers 

 and landlords disputing their several rights in proposals for legisla- 

 tion, repeated and supplemented almost annually, for about forty-five 

 years past. Hence the misery in the lowest grade, socially speaking, 

 of the rural population. Hence those continual desertions from its 

 ranks which have produced a one-sided, unhealthy condition in our 

 national existence, with one branch of its productive activity hyper- 

 trophied, and suffering in consequence, because industrial employ- 

 ment, like Kronos, devours its own children in, on an average, 

 about three generations — while the other branch, in truth the 

 root stock and parent trunk of national life, the nursery of our 

 national manhood, presents itself as shrivelled up and shrunk, 

 withering away, and comparatively unproductive as a result. 

 And hence that most troublesome unrest which, so far as it affects 

 industrial employment, keeps us in a constant feverheat of anxiety 

 and apprehension, while, on the rural side, it stanches the flow of 

 production. 



We cannot, indeed, well look upon our country life so seen without 

 remembering our old sins, continued through some centuries, both 

 of commission and of omission, consisting not only of shameful 

 neglect of that branch of our national family which we ought to have 

 cherished and tended with particular care, but of actually robbing it 

 of what it possessed to give it hope and contentment. We have, in 

 fact, actually starved and crippled it. 



Look at the other side of country life ! For the well-to-do there 

 is no home-life like that in our island. It forms the envy and ideal 

 of country folk in all other countries, the model upon which they 

 labour to build up their own, with its healthy existence, its sports, 



