12 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY 



Before the War we took little heed of these 

 things. Wheat produced on distant prairies 

 poured into our granaries at the docks from the 

 holds of great ships filled with the staff of life, 

 and it came across the oceans at less freightage 

 costs from San Francisco to Barrow-in-Furness 

 than it did from Melton Constable in Norfolk 

 to London. Derelict fields in English counties, 

 which once grew abundant wheat, became 

 grazing ground for cattle. A slight recovery 

 in farming prospects took place before the War, 

 through the increasing demand for milk ; but 

 this did not mean more work for the plough, 

 or the settlement of a larger rural population. 

 On the contrary, the rural exodus went on with 

 fatal facility enfeebling the heart of Old 

 England. In many districts more and more 

 farms were engrossed and became ranches for 

 cows and store cattle, and the labourer, who 

 remained on the land, had become even more 

 dependent upon the goodwill of his master 

 than when Gray wrote his immortal Elegy or 

 Crabbe his Poems, for he was now, through the 

 operations of century-old Acts of Enclosure, 

 entirely divorced from the soil. 



It is recorded that in one parish alone a 

 single owner absorbed over thirty small free- 

 holds, and Sir Daniel Hall, in his Agriculture 

 after the War, cites an instance of a man who, 

 partly by purchase and partly by hiring, 

 obtained the control of some 8600 acres which 



