89 



of the industrial community who take a keen interest in social move- 

 ments even with greater opportunities, to understand and forgive. 



Those who meet the rural worker personally know well, sometimes 

 to their cost, that he is independent and tenacious of the rights he has 

 been used to exercise, and quick to a high degree to discern rights or 

 pririleges he may exercise. Mr. J. F. Duncan, the secretary of the 

 Scottish Farm Servants' Union, who has been used to a better paid 

 class of farm labour, says the farm worker of England " is certainly 

 not the dull, spiritless creature which imaginative writers have always 

 presented to us as the typical ' Hodge ' of England." The rural worker 

 differs from the urban worker chiefly, if not wholly, in the external 

 circumstances that he has no trade or class organisation through which 

 he can express his feeling of industrial or political grievance or voice 

 his industrial or political aspirations, that his facilities for education 

 have been poorer, that his work does not bring him into contact with 

 so many people and thus stimulate mental intercourse and imagination, 

 and that his opportunities for social intercourse have been more con- 

 fined. These circumstances can be changed and the rural worker 

 fitted to exercise the power his numbers entitle him to, both in the 

 industrial and political world. The urban worker can give him much 

 assistance towards this end. But the first need is a development of 

 industrial conditions which will provide him an adequate income and 

 some leisure wherewith to improve the higher personal and social 

 phases of the life of his family. 



In speaking on his paper, Mr. Ashby said that the industrial workers 

 present might think that the interests of industrial workers and rural 

 workers in agricultural questions were identical ; and under some 

 circumstances this was the case. When a question arose as to the 

 absolute supply of food their interests, as consumers, were identical ; 

 but when the question of methods of production arose, the industrialists 

 were concerned only as consumers, while agricultural workers were 

 concerned as producers, and as they produced more than sufficient 

 to support their families, and their financial interests depended upon 

 the surplus of production, interests at once diverged. 



At the present moment we had a population of 46,000,000 and a 

 cultivated area of 46,000,000 acres. It might be possible to extend 

 that area a little, but even so it would work out to barely 1J acres 

 per person. Were we, as a nation, to try to be self-supporting on the 

 basis of one acre or 1 J acres per person, it was probable that the dieting 

 of the people would be much less rich and varied than at present. 

 One question the industrial workers would have to settle, because of 

 their political power, was whether we should try to sustain the popula- 

 tion on this basis, regardless of cost or the result on dieting, or whether 

 we should develop our farming on economical lines without attempting 

 to stimulate production by means of tariffs or subsidies. This was 

 why a number of people advocated large farms. The large farm, 



