258 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



workers working for themselves — necessarily must have wage-paid 

 labour to labour for them. And they do not grudge it, or cut it 

 down. 



But even our fifty-acre holder is not altogether independent of 

 labour, to be paid for either in wages or else in some other way. 

 The evidence given in the last Royal Commission Inquiry shows 

 that there is a growing feeling of discontent occasioned by the fact 

 of adult children of the occupier being made to work without wages 

 such as they could call their " very own." Not a few of these young 

 folk are likely either to claim a fair wage or else to seek employment 

 elsewhere. And often enough will such a holder want to go for a 

 time beyond the narrow circle of his own family, in order to see some 

 necessary piece of work dispatched promptly under favouring cir- 

 cumstances. To supply the needs of small occupiers among them- 

 selves no doubt we shall see Co-operative Labour Societies growing 

 up, after the pattern of the French associations syndicates and similar 

 organisations, in which the reward for labour given will consist 

 in labour returned — labour being given " one for all, and all for 

 one," just as implements and machinery are already given out 

 co-operatively to be used in turn. But it will take time to 

 form such societies, and they are scarcely likely to cover the 

 entire ground waiting to be occupied. So there must be wage- 

 labour still. 



And then there is the other side of labour to consider. Many of 

 our coming settlers are likely to be labourers, taking only a small 

 holding and looking for employment besides to make up what they 

 need for a living. We begin with the fifty acre holding, a holding 

 supposed to be large enough to admit, indeed, of cultivation by one 

 family, but also large enough to maintain a full family in fair 

 comfort. That is the ordinary beginning — the beginning with 

 which the Germans ushered in their (on the whole fruitful) settle- 

 ment work. They soon, however, saw reason to come down from 

 such rather pretentious level. There is among the rural population 

 a call for holdings of all sizes. Denmark, the model country for 

 small cultivators, has now in all 750,000 holdings, 133,600 of less 

 than twelve acres. Paid labour in millions of cases claims to be allied 

 with independent husbandry. The New Zealand Government, when 

 laying itself out for concurrently rapidly constructing roads and 

 railways, and also crushing the outrageous " sweating " which it 

 found to be practised by sub-contractors for the work, wisely — we 

 may say that, for the result has shown the policy to be sound — - 

 offered grants of land of the size of only ten and fifteen acres apiece 



