Chapter III 



TEACHING THE CULTIVATORS 



With the admission, for a large part still only prospective, of 

 a numerous class of new men into the ranks of our cultivators of 

 land, the task of providing for further instruction in agricultural 

 science among adults — recognised want that it was before — assumes, 

 together with a very much widened field opened to it for its applica- 

 tion, at the same time also a rather essentially changed aspect, of 

 greater urgency and much intensified importance, which import- 

 ance will have to be admitted to be truly national. Fifty-four years 

 ago, when we widened the limit of our political electorate, we 

 promptly set about " educating our masters " — educating them to 

 a knowledge of the use of their new power — in the fulfilment of 

 which task it will have to be admitted that we have moderately well 

 succeeded. Being now engaged in handing over our land to a new 

 class of occupiers, all of them of course adult, we might be thought 

 to be wanting in our duty to these men, as well as to ourselves, if we 

 failed to provide for their technical instruction in their new craft — 

 all the more that we find pessimist prophets enough among us, 

 recruited from among the class of those hitherto regarded as experts 

 in husbandry, that is, landlords and large farmers, who flatly deny 

 the possibility of success in our enterprise and pronounce our under- 

 taking hopeless. We have excellent stuff, to be sure, among those 

 who already occupy land in small parcels, as brilliant examples of 

 specialist knowledge and competency as we know that we have 

 among the elite of our larger farmers — men who know to admira- 

 tion how to deal with their specialist crops, and also men who know 

 how to work their way up rapidly and successfully under a financial 

 aspect from a small holding to a large, from comparative poverty 

 to a position of comparative wealth. But we are planning to bring 

 into the agricultural ranks all sorts of men — agricultural labourers, 

 many of whom have, in the evidence given before the recent Royal 

 Commission, been described as " inefficient," the rest carefully, and 

 as if deliberately, brought up as only " one-job " men, to whom 

 husbandry as a whole is still a sealed book. Moreover, townsmen, 

 of whom it may be presumed that they know little about agricul- 

 ture, and a host of retired soldiers and sailors, among whom, no 

 doubt, will be found a goodly number of men used to farm work, 



