LABOUE 257 



one hand, some of us naturally will feel disposed to lament, as 

 Robert Southey did two generations ago, over the disappearance of 

 the "picturesque " (but, as Macaulay pointed out, also terribly un- 

 sanitary) old cottages, with their thatched roofs, and their ivy-clad 

 archaic windows, now replaced by far more prosaic, but also far 

 more hygienically sound structures, more people are sure, in this 

 specifically utilitarian age, to congratulate themselves upon the gain 

 secured to profitableness and production. After all, the proof of the 

 pudding is in the eating. We value our plain-shaped Christinas 

 pudding, with its rich composition which fills the stomach, a great 

 deal more than we should the most artistically ornamented but 

 " thin " panetone which delights the hearts of the Milanese. Besides, 

 the anticipatingly lamented loss in picturesqueness is by no means 

 unavoidable. What is taken away in one shape may easily be 

 replaced in another. In any case the change seems inevitable. 



However, such change in national agriculture, in which necessarily 

 large farmers will — as occupying most territory, operating with more 

 money, and making more of a " business " of their husbandry than 

 the small — necessarily also have to take the lead, involves a much 

 larger employment of labour — labour which, in view of its costliness, 

 and the value of the return aimed at, will have to be carefully trained 

 and of a higher quality than what on an average we have hitherto 

 been content with. Therefore the demand for labour promises to 

 be increased rather than diminished. 



And there is more. For by the side of the large farmer, requiring 

 " hands " for his work, we see, as a new feature, organised con- 

 sumers coming into the ranks of owners and tillers of land. They 

 already occupy — once more, either (and most generally) as owners. 

 or else as tenants — large stretches of land. The Co-operative 

 Wholesale Society of Manchester alone owns somewhere about 

 50,000 acres — besides large estates in Canada, kept especially for 

 wheat growing. Its dairy farms yield it some 12,1 H M I gallons of milk 

 per day. And that quantity increases steadily, since apart from 

 improvements being effected in its herds, surrounding fanners now 

 send in their milk to the Co-operative depots, as the most convenient 

 or else most remunerative way of disposing of their produoe. I he 

 Scottish Wholesale Society is in the field with an acreage propor- 

 tioned to its own strength. And local societies likewise ooonpy and 

 utilise much land. That movement is not likely to abate. It is, 

 on the contrary, sure to expand. And it is right that it should do 

 so. And these co-operative consumers' societies which for the 

 present still recognise no co-operative production m the sense of the 



B.R. ■ 



