262 THREE ACRES AND LIBERTY 



happening can be measured in terms of food. That is 

 important, no doubt, but it is not the most important thing. 

 I am confident that it will add more than anything else to 

 the spiritual resources of the nation. It is the beginning of a 

 war on the disease that is blighting our people. What is 

 wrong with us ? What is the root of our social and spiritual 

 ailment ? Is it not the divorce of the people from the soil ? 

 For generations the wholesome red blood of the country 

 has been sucked into the great towns, and we have built 

 up a vast machine of industry that has made slaves of us, 

 shut out the light of the fields from our lives, left our children 

 to grow like weeds in the slums, rootless and waterless, 

 poisoned the healthy instincts of nature implanted in us, 

 and put in their place the rank growths of the streets. Can 

 you walk through a working-class district or a Lancashire 

 cotton town, with then* huddle of airless streets, without a 

 feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enor- 

 mous perversion of life into the arid channels of death ? Can 

 you take pride in an Empire on which the sun never sets 

 when you think of the courts in which, as Will Crooks says, 

 the sun never rises? 



" And now the sun is going to rise. We have started a 

 revolution that will not end until the breath of the earth 

 has come back to the soul of the people. The tyranny of 

 the machine is going to be broken. The tyranny of the land 

 monopoly is going to be lifted. Yes, you say, but these 

 people that I see working on the allotments are not the 

 people from the courts and the slums ; but professional men, 

 the superior artisan, and so on, That is true. But the 

 movement must get hold of the intelligentsia first. The im- 

 portant thing is that the breach in the prison is made ; the 

 fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born not still-born, 



