326 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



The Commission had already welcomed the addition of 

 landowning members which it imagined the Government 

 would appoint in due course, and it had no intention of 

 spending much time on hackneyed subjects such as co- 

 operation and small-holdings, which had been fully discussed 

 by the Selborne Committee. 



Every economist has agreed that a policy of guaranteed 

 prices, whether one is in favour of it or is not, can only 

 be a temporary, artificial device, and that if the economic 

 prospect of agriculture is to build on that as a foundation 

 stone, it will be built on shifting sands, swayed by varying 

 political waves of feeling. Its permanent prosperity is surely 

 dependent upon giving security of tenure to farmers, cottage- 

 rights to labourers, a new system of transport and marketing, 

 drainage, equipment of farms, the abolition of game laws, 

 which are by no means efficiently explored by the Selborne 

 Committee, especially in view of the changed conditions 

 since the end of the war. But as the editor of Farm Life 

 wrote : * 



" the Government had already made up its mind and did not 

 intend to do anything suggested by the Commission that had 

 not been agreed upon previously by the gentlemen behind the 

 scenes who manage these affairs whether they concern corn 

 or coal or less essential matters. . . . No body of men has ever 

 enquired into the agricultural problem more ably, or painstak- 

 ingly, or courageously than the Farmer and Labour members 

 of this Commission ; and the present day student and the 

 future historian alike will find in the evidence, and especially 

 in the replies to questions, more illumination on the details of 

 British agriculture in our time than can be found anywhere else." 



Though the Interim Report was restricted to a statement 

 on the merits or demerits of guaranteed prices, and concerned 

 the farmer more than the labourer, the student will find in 

 the printed evidence abundant information dealing with the 

 life of the labourer. 



Lord Lee, though possessing great energy, is a man of war 

 rather than an agriculturist ; and his Prime Minister is essen- 

 tially a politician. Neither of them is an economist. Neither 

 of them seems to have grasped the fact, for instance, that if 



1 March 6, 1920. 



