274 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



more, and at the same time serves as a safeguard against improvident 

 employment of the shares accruing. In agriculture, with circum- 

 stances so very different from those prevailing in industry, as already 

 observed, it seems doubtful whether, at any rate in ordinary cases, 

 co-partnership could be made applicable. 



However, apart from co-partnership, agriculture lends itself 

 particularly well to the practice of profit-sharing — in some respects 

 more readily than industry. For employment is in agriculture 

 distinctly more localised and rendered more permanently personal ; 

 and the connection of the worker with his farm, and also his per- 

 sonal relations with his employer, are far closer and more intimate. 

 The number of men employed is in each instance smaller, and the 

 employer, in every case only one, is to the man a living, animated 

 creature, with a character that they can appraise, a record to his con- 

 duct, a human side to his person, which knows how to " give " and 

 to " take " — not an impersonal " John Company," " without a body 

 to kick or a soul to be damned " ; or else a reputed money-grubber, 

 eager only for gain. 



There is, to begin with, therefore, readier confidence between the 

 two parties concerned. And book-keeping — if we will only leave 

 those utterly misleading calculations of " valuations," very un- 

 wisely and recklessly introduced for income tax purposes, out of 

 account — is so readily amenable to the conditions of husbandry 

 that there need be no misgiving whatever on that score. 



In considering the matter we ought to bear in mind that at the 

 present time, when rural reconstruction is an aim that the nation 

 has seriously and determinedly proposed to itself, the class of rural 

 labourers that we shall have to think of will be a different class 

 altogether from the stolid, abject, houseless and landless, and 

 therefore unthinking, class of pariahs of former times. Together 

 with the tied cottage — for the abolition of which an active housing 

 movement is on foot — and the " landless labourer " — for whose 

 suppression we have entered upon a fruitful allotment and small 

 holdings campaign — the long-continued abject dependence of 

 the rural labourer upon his " betters," which kept him torpid, 

 inert, unthinking, callous, in the consciousness of his condemnation 

 to an unchanging, a hopeless level of prospectless existence — seems 

 doomed. An interest in life is given to the labourer. If he has not 

 yet actually got his little parcel of land, he looks forward to its 

 acquisition, and from that to the position of a small farmer farming 

 on his own account. With that, contentedness with his present 

 position as a mere mechanical " one-job man " must come to an 



