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can be formed to provide for representation of his interests. Persons 

 with larger incomes and possessing more leisure cannot afford the time 

 or money necessary to understand the almost endless stream of laws, 

 orders, and regulations supposed to be administered in rural areas ; 

 and to enforce consideration of his interest the rural worker will have 

 to provide and pay for representation. Here again the young and 

 intelligent men are wanted to organise the rank and file of the trade 

 union or other voluntary association, and from whom to select and 

 train representatives. 



In a wider social sphere, also, there is much to be done to make 

 rural life bright and congenial to the men with intellectual and social 

 interests. A large amount could be done through the village schools 

 if we could develop a philosophy of rural life similar to those developing 

 in other countries in which the rural workers form a much larger 

 proportion of the total population. The village clubs and recreation 

 grounds must also grow in numbers and importance. Many villagers 

 will soon find their own forms of recreation when leisure and a little 

 surplus income are available, but there is some danger that they may 

 follow the rather thin commercial amusements of the towns. 



The urban worker can do much to assist the rural worker in the 

 matters of association and education, upon which the improvement 

 of rural social life depends, but he will first have to get a much better 

 conception of the character of the rural worker than that which is now 

 common. Ever since Edwin Markham wrote The Man with the Hoe 

 it has become quite common to regard the agricultural labourer less 

 as a man than as a creature or a thing. This attitude is often found 

 in literature, even in literature circulating amongst industrial workers, 

 and seems to be quite commonly accepted. According to this idea 

 the agricultural labourer is a thing with a ' bowed back,' and ' empty 

 face,' a ' loose and brutal jaw,' a ' slanting brow/ and a ' stunned 

 and stolid mind,' * Brother to the ox.' 



" A thing that grieves not and that never hopes." 



His name is ' Hodge,' with all its implications in common 

 parlance. There is only one other class in industrial life to which a 

 name is so commonly and closely applied, and that is the merchant- 

 seamen. But ' Jack ' is a name honourable in its implications, not 

 derogatory as in the case of ' Hodge.' To find a real analogy for the 

 common denomination of the farm worker we should have to go back 

 to the days previous to the Plimsoll agitation and the Seamen's Union, 

 when the merchant-seaman was known as ' Poor Jack.' In recent 

 years there has been only one analogy to the name of ' Hodge,' and 

 that was ' Tommy Atkins ' in the days when the army was largely 

 recruited from the misfits of the industrial world. ^K 



To those of us who have worked and lived with the agricultural 

 labourer the current idea of him and the name were only significant of 

 the blindness of those who held or used them. We might be often 

 disappointed by his industrial or political weakness, but we had only 

 to remember the obstacles he had to encounter, and the small proportion 



