AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 117 



untilled fields, and the motor lorry into the 

 lanes. More important still, it converted the 

 farm worker to trade unionism. Attendance 

 at trade union branches and Wages Committees 

 has trained him to express himself in speech 

 in a manner which would have been impossible 

 in the days of Joseph Arch. Then the 

 labourer's vocabulary was said to be limited to 

 five hundred words, and over 80 per cent, of 

 farm workers were unable to read. 



Across the table at District Wages Com- 

 mittees Hodge has had to look at farming from a 

 wider point of view than that of wages and hours. 

 On Agricultural Committees he has had to 

 consider national interests as paramount, and 

 although he owns scarcely a rood of it there is 

 no greater lover of the land than the farm 

 labourer, and no one who resents more it being 

 butchered and made waste. His knowledge of 

 the fields would be more intimate than that of 

 the farmers, his criticisms more searching, and 

 he would be less susceptible than the farmer 

 to the subtle influence of social pressure. The 

 tractor-ploughman, the man who is engineer 

 as well as husbandman, has now made his 

 appearance in the countryside, and it is from 

 men of this type we may expect to see an 

 increase of administrative ability amongst the 

 farm workers. What I have said of the young 

 farm worker who has seen during the War 

 different methods of cultivation in foreign 



