92 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY 



The ordinary citizen may not care whether 

 the farmer or the labourer has security of 

 tenure or not. He may care less whether the 

 workers' minimum wages are to have permanent 

 statutory sanction ; but what he must care 

 about is the enforcement of the rules of good 

 husbandry on the limited soil of his island 

 home. 



The official spokesmen for the Government 

 had one powerful argument in defence of 

 the Bill. They said that if the community 

 guaranteed prices, the community then had 

 the right to compel good cultivation. That 

 argument has now been destroyed. The Lords 

 saw to it that the community did not come 

 into the picture at all, unless dressed as a scare- 

 crow ; and the Commons humbly bowed their 

 acquiescence. 



As far as the farmers are concerned it is not 

 security of tenure they get, but compensation 

 for disturbance, and even this has been modified 

 by the House of Landlords leaving the gate 

 wide open for lawyers to enter. Few legis- 

 lators cared publicly (though some of them 

 have been fined as transgressors under the 

 19 1 7 Act) to deny the labourer a statutory 

 living wage. The Agricultural Wages Board 

 is to remain ; but the Lords seized the oppor- 

 tunity in an attempt to keep the farm-tied 

 labourer a serf. Not that the Government 

 had shown any eagerness to free him, for there 



