RISE AND DEVELOPMENT n 



still in proportion as the industrial and middle classes 

 regarded more and more in the light of necessaries what 

 their forefathers would have considered luxuries, even if 

 they had, in their day, been able to obtain them at all ; 

 and, in the result, although foreign competition caused a 

 shrinkage in the area devoted to wheat, the needs of urban 

 populations led to an increased demand for other food 

 supplies of a type that once more widened out the scope 

 for agricultural organisation. 



EXAMPLE OF DENMARK. 



While these various conditions had been affecting 

 Europe in general, Denmark was, more especially, stirred 

 into action by the urgent need, following on the results of 

 her conflict with Prussia, to improve her economic con- 

 dition ; and this she sought to do by organising her 

 agricultural industries on such a basis that she could supply 

 other countries, and more particularly Great Britain, with 

 the butter, bacon and eggs that are now no less needed than 

 wheat, flour and bread. Opportunity for agricultural 

 expansion was thus opened out to Danish producers who, 

 in the circumstances, could afford to disregard the 

 competition of wheat from the American continent or 

 elsewhere. 



ORGANISATION FOR PRODUCTION. 



Denmark, too, carried the general movement still 

 further. Her peasant proprietors followed up organisa- 

 tion alike for credit and for collective purchase by 

 organisation for production. Regarding agriculture as a 

 business, they applied to it the same principle of a 

 " factory " that Manchester cotton-spinners had already 

 applied to their own industry, the main difference in such 

 application being that the Danes worked together mainly 

 on co-operative lines. 



Once more we may find precedents for the course thus 

 adopted. So far back as the fourteenth and fifteenth 



