74 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



once — which thought precious little about the economic interests 

 of agriculture. We have landlords fighting unitedly still— no 

 longer for " the 'ares and the foxes," but for their proprietary 

 rights, which they hold to be endangered by the claims of the opposite 

 party of tenants, acting likewise in common, to obtain security of 

 tenure, which they insist that they have not now got. We have 

 had a " Farmers' Alliance," we have labourers' unions, now clamour- 

 ing for class rights of their own. But where is an organisation for 

 united action of all classes concerned with agriculture — an organisa- 

 tion which, speaking with authority as representing the whole of 

 agriculture, would be sure to make the claims of agriculture under- 

 stood and respected ? 



Agriculture as a productive force is felt to be in danger. Of 

 course, our agricultural public being what it is, looking— united 

 only in this— backward instead of forward, cultivating its fields 

 mechanically, in a dreamlike adherence to old customs, we have 

 old spavined and decayed stalking horses trotted out afresh, and 

 we have demands— which, thank goodness, the working classes, 

 now in the ascendant, will never agree to — put forward for " protec- 

 tion " and dear wheat. A struldbrug of Tudor times, coming to 

 life, would urge the claim of more sheep walks and wool, and a super- 

 struldbrug of still earlier days might ask for a free run for his 

 ' scrub " beasts through an uninclosed national forest. Why play 

 with the dolls of our infant days ? Dear wheat is no salvation for 

 the country, and subsidised wheat does not mean prosperity. 

 There is more wanted. We have, as it happens, had a lesson, and 

 a sharp one too, of what over-studied wheat-growing — a necessity 

 in times of emergency, but a folly in ordinary seasons— means. Our 

 public has been driven well-nigh to despair by the want of milk — 

 the indispensable " food for babies "—and butter and eggs and the 

 like. They have by such privations found themselves almost 

 reduced to the state of mind in which Saint Wilfrid, coming south, 

 found the population on the Sussex coast, newly commended to 

 his care, who, in despair of finding food, drowned themselves in 

 gangs in the sea, chaining themselves together in rows, in order to 

 make sure of sinking. Shrewd north-countryman that he was, he 

 taught these new charges of his how to put the sea, in which they 

 sought their death, to better use by extracting food from it in the 

 shape of fish, wherewith to save their lives. Our farmers have a 

 similar lesson to learn in respect of their land, which, as we now 

 know, by the light of recent testing, will yield all the more wheat 

 by not being over-cultivated with it, but having leguminous, leafy 



