Chapter XIII 

 CONCLUSION 



My tale being told, it may be permissible for me deuteronomically 

 to sum up in a concluding chapter my arguments used, running 

 over briefly the chief points. 



As to the urgency of Rural Reconstruction — the re-constitution of 

 our rural life under both its economic and its social aspects — not a 

 further word surely need be said. Everybody is agreed upon that. 

 The War has come and the War has gone, and its morrow has found 

 the country a changed country. The task set to us is, as it 

 happens, as comprehensive as it is urgent, and not altogether free 

 from difficulties. But whether difficult or easy, it has to be 

 grappled with, and that without delay. 



There is less unanimity in respect of the shape that the change 

 to be effected should take. Some of us would think only of agricul- 

 ture as a calling. That interest, indeed, forms part of our subject 

 and it badly needs reorganising, so as to become equal to the calls 

 that are made upon it. But it does not in itself fill up the canvas 

 to be covered. Others fix their eyes upon our land system and the 

 best form of possessory utilisation of the soil, whether by nationalisa- 

 tion or otherwise. We have done, of course, with the worn-out 

 tradition of quasi-sovereign " property," without any restrictions 

 in the interest of the community ; and the measure of the restric- 

 tions to be imposed, on which opinions differ greatly, deserves full 

 consideration. However, that point, once more, does not quite 

 complete our task. Others, again, have the maximum production 

 of wheat on the brain. With the younger Pliny, who warned his 

 countrymen centuries ago of the mistake that they were making, 

 we shall have to recognise that the first place in our consideration 

 is due, neither to wheat nor to landowner ship, but to human beings. 

 It is our population that we have to think of first, subordinating 

 the rules which are to govern the possession of land, and the organisa- 

 tion of agriculture, to its wants — the population, which now un- 

 happily divides itself between plethora, breeding distress, ill health, 

 faulty physique and almost chronic unrest in towns, and anaemia 

 advancing to atrophy wasting the opportunities vouchsafed to us 

 by nature in the country. 



The land, so we now all admit, exists for the " people," and the 



