GROWTH UNDER STORMY SKIES. 207 



holdings, allotments, cultivating waste land, and I, in com- 

 mon with other writers such as Mr. Roden Buxton, Mr. R. V. 

 Lennard, urged the necessity of a legal minimum wage 

 worked by District Wages Committees \yei none of us, not even 

 the Conservative advocate for a minimum wage, contemplated 

 guaranteeing prices to farmers. Agriculture was a sweated 

 industry and should be treated as one of the sweated indus- 

 tries under the Trade Boards Act which made no provisions 

 for the sale price of manufactured articles. 



The book, however, which produced the most facts and 

 arguments for Mr. Lloyd George's protracted Land Cam- 

 paign was the Rural Report of the Land Enquiry Com- 

 mittee which had been instituted under the sanction of the 

 Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 

 though the cost of it was defrayed by private individuals. 

 The chief organisers of the Rural Enquiry were Mr. R. L. 

 Reiss, Mr. C. Roden Buxton, and Mr. Seebohm Rowntree. 



Investigators were sent into every county of England 

 and Wales and searching enquiries were made into wages, 

 housing, allotments, small holdings, game preserving, 

 security of tenure, etc. When the Report was printed the 

 Chairman of the Committee, the Right Hon. A. H. Dyke 

 Acland, sponsored it with an introduction. In this intro- 

 duction he quotes the words of an Anglican clergyman who 

 wrote of his parish thus : 



" The recent Small Holdings Acts are dead letters here, being 

 completely vetoed by the power of the estate : a Labourers' 

 Union would be an unthinkable revolution here. Labourers in 

 these feudal villages are not regarded as people who should want 

 ' to rise.' ' 



Writing of the new and growing class of landowners, the 

 nouveaux riches, he quotes from Sir H. R. Haggard's Rural 



England : 



" The new style of owner, who, having accumulated money in 

 some commercial pursuit, buys a large estate, makes no legitimate 

 use of the land. His, as a rule, is merely a sporting interest, and 

 the rent being a matter of indifference to him he seeks to grow, 

 not produce, but partridges. ..." 



And from the same author: 



