336 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



to be neutralised by teaching specially adapted to its rural ambiant. 

 Education then, adapted to the environment, is the first and most 

 imperative requirement. 



The next, obviously, advancing one step, is, apart from education, 

 to provide for a decent and becoming living for dwellers in the 

 country dependent for their bread and butter on the labour of 

 their hands. We have been much exercised about the question 

 of employment and wages, and so far as wages go, in the monetary 

 aspect, we appear to have arrived at a settlement acceptable under 

 present conditions — which conditions may, of course, in future 

 change one way or another. Under the raised scale employers 

 naturally feel much as we income tax payers do generally at a rate 

 of 6s. in the pound, when in our young days we were led to consider 

 2>d. quite enough. People will accommodate themselves to that, 

 as in domestic life they have accommodated themselves to similar 

 changes. People coming back from India find that in Great Britain 

 they can very well do with fewer servants, and the old-world customs 

 of our early days in the household — so graphically described in Lady 

 Dorothy Nevill's various volumes — when, for instance, water having 

 to be carried up by hand, the " weekly bath " proved an engrossing 

 event and an exacting function, when lamps had to be trimmed by 

 hand — trimming all those " moderators " in a club was a laborious 

 business — and when shopping meant going to market with a basket 

 for chaffering and picking out things — have been not unsatisfactorily 

 replaced by more commodious arrangements. So, by the way, it 

 is likely to prove also in the employment of agricultural labour — 

 more especially now that finely subdivided electric power has been 

 made available for service in farm and home. Organisation and 

 labour-saving instruments may effect a great deal to compensate 

 the rise in wages. The apparent hard-and-fastness adopted in the 

 limitation of hours of labour is likewise likely to prove something 

 of a bugbear, once our traditional spirit of give and take has come 

 fully to assert itself. The earliest complaints about abuse of the 

 Saturday half-holiday regulations turn out to have been exaggera- 

 tions ; and that half-holiday is, on the other hand, reported to have 

 brought about a distinct change of mind for the better among 

 employees, to whom extra employment has now become a matter 

 of free choice, subject to their own pleasure, showing that to that 

 extent they are free men. They are not unlikely to meet employers 

 willingly in the disposal of their statutory free time. If only the 

 great problem, overtopping all others in this connection, that is, 

 the provision of house accommodation, independent of employment, 



