194 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



sale, than by simply giving them money to spend. She began on a 

 modest scale at Sedan. The idea proved so excellent in its results, by 

 not only affording relief to needy folk, but also producing something 

 that is worth a great deal more, namely, the training of, for the most 

 part, the shiftless, improvident and idle loafers to a life of industry 

 and self-reliance, that the movement spread rapidly over all France. 

 There is another side also to the benefits obtainable from allotments. 

 In other countries, where alfresco life is more common and more 

 valued than in our own — climatic conditions accounting in part 

 for the difference — you will see allotments near large towns to a 

 much greater extent than among ourselves turned to account as 

 pleasure gardens, with arbours and tonnelles, and even lightly built 

 chalets in them, in which the tenants' families spend their off-hours 

 in fine weather most enjoyably. 



Small holdings are a different thing from allotments, and the 

 country is not a town. However, with the same process at work, 

 willing local people, having all only one object in view, and working 

 manfully for the same, might be expected to produce, even in the 

 country, better results than the county councils, with the Ministry 

 of Agriculture above them, can now claim to have to their credit. 



The matter is, however, of the greatest national importance, as 

 part of the desired reorganisation of its general economy on lines 

 bidding fair to insure contentment and production, turning our land 

 to the best possible account and resulting in " the greatest good to 

 the greatest number." 



In what has thus far been done there are several important points 

 to which it may be thought that insufficient attention has been 

 paid — except by some individual advanced thinkers, whose names 

 will readily occur to those familiar with the subject. 



The first among these points is this, that the cultivation of land 

 is not a matter which can be entrusted indifferently to any one, 

 with the assumed certainty of his making a good thing out of it, 

 increasing national production, and earning for himself a good or 

 fair return. It seems to me that we have paid far too little attention 

 to this. One of the plainest evidences of this is the easy, airy way 

 in which we talk of settling discharged soldiers on the land, as if, 

 as a matter of course, the man who has handled a rifle will as deftly 

 handle his spade and hoe, and provide for himself an assured and 

 prosperous future. As it happens, from the day of Sylla down- 

 ward to the last experiment of the kind made on the island of 

 Hokkaido, soldiers have proved about the worst and least constant 

 settlers that there have been. In Italy they have deserted entire 



