30 My Little Farm 



man who does not. Let him give up his land and 

 become an honest labourer. For the credit of 

 agriculture and for the good of Ireland, the sooner 

 he loses his land the better. Meantime, I would 

 put a tax of many shillings per acre on him, to be 

 exempted only by his passing an examination. 

 Leaving a nation's soil in the occupation of a lazy 

 and illiterate man is about as bad as putting it in 

 pawn with a usurer, and industrial illiteracy 

 becomes more economically intolerable throughout 

 the world every day. Progressive civilisation can 

 no longer be supported anywhere by any form of 

 industrial production dependent on brute force 

 only, and this fact is at the bottom of the failure 

 in Irish farming. The knowledge is not enough 

 to make the soil and the labour on it progressively 

 productive, and the production can never be 

 enough to establish the necessary knowledge so 

 long as the expenditure on " education " is 

 conducted to perpetuate the ignorance. The 

 farmer has no better right to the soil than any 

 other man, except in so far as he can produce 

 more from it. 



My stream is the one thing on the farm that 

 has behaved in a uniformly admirable manner 

 from the first. Fed from permanent springs up 

 the country, it runs into the middle of my land, 

 turns a right angle there, and runs out at the other 

 side, with the result that every field, without 

 exception, touches water at some point. The 

 contrast in the drawings at the front shows how 

 the " bottoms " adjoining the stream were every- 



