X A FARAfER'S YEAR 



There the hideous grinding competition of the age leaves little 

 room for those from whom the last possible ounce of brain or 

 body work can be no longer pressed. They go to the wall, they 

 sink to the slum, and the Dock gate, and the House, and the 

 hospital ward. I say that from these great towns with their aggre- 

 gated masses of mankind, there rises one eternal wail of misery — 

 the hopeless misery that with all its drawbacks the country 

 does not know, of those who, having fallen, are being trampled 

 by those who stand. 



Such are the things of the cities, with their prizes for the few, 

 their blanks, their despairs for the many. And all the while 

 — that is why I speak of them and their pomps and poverties — 

 outside these human hives lie the wide, neglected lands of 

 England, peopled often enough but by a few struggling farmers, 

 and in the course of desertion by a dwindling handful of labouring 

 folk. And yet here should be — not palaces with deer parks only, 

 though sometimes these have their uses — but tens and twenties of 

 thousands of quiet homes, where, given easier conditions as regards 

 carriage, taxation and markets, families might live, not in riches 

 indeed, but in ample comfort ; in health of body and of mind, with 

 pure air, pure thoughts, pure sights. Oh ! who will so handle 

 matters as to make this enthusiast's dream a possibility, who will 

 turn the people to the land again and thus lessen the load of a 

 nation's sorrows? And from the empty waste of half-tilled acres 

 floats back the echo 'Who?' 



Most of us pass such problems with a shrug ; they do not 

 concern us we think. 



It is an unnatural war between the cities and the land which 

 bore and nurtured them, if that can be called a war where die 



