APPENDIX 467 



And now one word as to the possible remedies for a state of affairs 

 which I think most people will be inclined to admit is not natural, 

 and which may prove disastrous. First, I will say that in my humble 

 opinion what a speaker in this Chamber a month or two ago very 

 aptly called sugar-plum cures are no cures at all, though in certain 

 instances they may be palliatives, and after all palliatives are not 

 to be despised. I mean that such things as better housing, more 

 technical education, more rural holidays, such as flower shows and 

 ploughing matches, more coffee-rooms and games of draughts, &c., will 

 never suffice to keep the labourer on the land unless you are able to 

 raise the labourer's wages. No, if you offered him a house with hot and 

 cold water laid on throughout, and lit with electric light, and took him 

 to and from his work on a motor-car, and had a coffee stall erected upon 

 every farm, and brought him to a lecture three times a week, it would 

 not persuade him to accept 12s. or 135". a week when he knows, or 

 believes, that by transferring himself and his family to two or three 

 squalid rooms in the dingy courts of a great town, he can earn 2os. or 

 25^-., for, as I said before, wages, and nothing but wages, to speak 

 broadly, is at the bottom of this movement from the country to the 

 towns. 



Another remedy which in my opinion is no remedy is the semi- 

 Socialistic legislation that is advocated by some, by which I mean 

 legislation whereof the real, if not the ostensible, object is to better 

 the position of the labouring classes out of the pockets of the owners 

 and occupiers of land and the allied sections of society, as by forcing 

 them to build houses that cannot possibly be remunerative at their 

 own cost, or to become responsible for anything and everything that 

 may happen to a man in their employ, however entirely it may be his 

 own fault. It is no remedy, as I think, for this reason, that you cannot 

 get blood out of a stone. The land, or at least our Eastern Counties 

 land, can bear no more burdens. As it is, with wheat from 24^. to 25^. 

 per quarter, it does not pay, and another straw or two upon the camel's 

 back will break it. Governments, it is probable, would like to solve 

 the trouble in this fashion, namely, by spoliation of certain classes for 

 the benefit of other classes, for Governments naturally attack the 

 weak that is those who have few votes and offer them up as a sacri- 

 fice to those who have many votes, and from whom they hope to win 

 support. But although the agricultural interest, with its seven or eight 

 millions of people who are connected with it, is, I suppose, because of 

 its suicidal divisions, its timidity, and its want of political organisation, 



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