54 THE GREEN RISING 



lively insignificant portion of the farm population. 

 Unions of agricultural workers exist in all these 

 countries, but their influence on the length of the 

 working day and other aspects of labor conditions 

 has not been very significant. "Their agreed work- 

 ing day varies reasonably with seasons, and in 

 Sweden with districts," says Helen Douglas Irvine, 

 "and they are readier than the Italians and 

 Spaniards to allow overtime, paid for at an extra 

 rate, in tunes of heavy work. This difference be- 

 tween south and north depends, in the first place, 

 on the absence of agricultural unemployment in the 

 north. In Sweden the population is sparse save in 

 the south; timberfelling and some other industries 

 rival agriculture as a market for labour; and on the 

 richer soil tillage is intensive. There is even a 

 shortage of agricultural labour in some parts of 

 Sweden. In Denmark cultivation is so highly in- 

 tensive that it absorbs the available supply of 

 labour. Sweden and Denmark are also differenti- 

 ated from Italy and Spain because their peoples 

 make no effective demand for land nationalization. 

 They are without the horde of unemployed and 

 land-hungry peasants and labourers whom a So- 

 cialist agitator can regiment in his army. The 

 Swedish and Danish nations, of whom so many are 

 small thriving farmers, do not desire to overthrow 

 the present system of land tenure, although some 

 of them may wish to modify it here and there. 

 Their trade-unions do not demand conditions in- 



