70 My Little Farm 



statesmen grinding out their futile programmes 

 to restore the normal balance, by tariff statutes ; 

 and politicians preaching " Back to the Land," 

 for its value in votes ; but I knew that the ultimate 

 way back to the land was through increased 

 remuneration for productive power in food, to 

 come about by the advancing disproportion 

 between food and appetite. What I could not 

 foresee was the tragic rapidity with which the 

 crisis must be hastened by the greatest and most 

 destructive war in the history of the world. I 

 do not believe that the Irish peasant has yet 

 entered upon the possession of himself sufficiently 

 to secure his proper share in the possession of the 

 gains in view ; but the farmer's day has come, and 

 it may be long, for though the war end before this 

 chapter, and though it leave the farmer's profit 

 doubled, it cannot wholly stop the townward 

 movement of modern life, which must find its 

 ultimate limit in terms of food and prices. The 

 war must in some measure reduce the rate of 

 townward displacement, but modern life remains 

 to correct its urban psychology by the painful 

 evidence of the stomach. The economic revolu- 

 tion in modern industrial method has not yet 

 ceased to work towards the town and away from 

 the soil. 



I could see fundamental forces surely active in 

 my favour as a farmer, but the equation of time 

 remained uncertain. The dominant tendency 

 was certainly on my side, but it belonged to that 

 class of sociological tendencies whose reaction is 



