AUTHOR'S NOTE ix 



reasonable reward, the tillers themselves, abandoning the free 

 air their fathers breathed for centuries, have swarmed to inhabit 

 the grim and sweltering courts of cities. Under like circumstances 

 at least Rome did not remain prosperous. 



Heretofore John Bull has been depicted as a countryman and 

 nothing else, a comparison with meaning. If henceforth he is lo 

 forsake the soil that bred him, how will he be pictured by our 

 children, drawing from a changed and shrunken model ? 



Indeed to the millions who follow it, and therefore to the nation 

 at large, although few seem to understand that this is so, the 

 practice of Agriculture — that primeval occupation and the cleanest 

 of them all — means more than the growing of grass and grain. 

 It means, among other things, the engendering and achieve- 

 ment of patient, even minds in sound enduring bodies, gifts 

 of which, after the first generation, the great towns rob those 

 who dwell and labour in them. And when those gifts are gone, 

 or greatly lessened, what does history teach us of the fate of the 

 peoples who have lost them ? 



When, too, the countryman has put on a black coat, or, for 

 that matter, kept to his corduroys, what welcome has the city he 

 craves for him ? What kind of places are these cities to live in, 

 for the poor ? What mercy do they show to those who fall sick 

 or fail ? Ask the labouring man who seeks work after the cheap 

 hair-dye ceases to conceal that he is turned of fifty. Ask the 

 clerk, competent, blameless (and married, with a family), but on 

 the wrong side of forty-five. Ask the widow derelict and tossing 

 upon that bitter sea. They will reply with a paraphrase of the 

 famous saying of the Emperor Charles V., or would if they knew 

 it, 'Cities are women, who reserve their favours for the young.' 



