142 EVESHAM AND ITS STORY 



these factories are produced on 30,000 farms, repre- 

 senting 1,500,000 acres of land, and the amount paid 

 to the growers gives a total of $25,000,000. The number 

 of cans turned out in the course of a season is 600,000,000, 

 the wholesale price of which is put at $48,000,000. 

 ' Why,' it is asked at Evesham, ' should we not do 

 more of this kind of business at home, instead of either 

 leaving our fruit and vegetables in the gardens, in 

 prolific seasons, or getting non-remunerative prices from 

 glutted markets, and then actually importing canned 

 fruits and vegetables from other countries, simply 

 because, as it would seem, we have not sufficient enter- 

 prise to work up our surplus stock ourselves ?' 



Nor do the Evesham growers look at the question 

 from an exclusively selfish point of view. The creation 

 here of a big canning industry would be good, they say, 

 not alone for the country districts, but also for the 

 towns, since, as the American statistics show, it would 

 mean a substantial increase in the volume of employ- 

 ment for can-makers, printers, and others working 

 mainly in the urban centres. Some degree of help 

 would thus be given to the solution of the problem of 

 unemployed artisans, in affording them work of a kind 

 for which they were better adapted than, as persons who 

 had spent all their lives in towns, they would be for 

 actual fruit-raising. That, at least, is the point of view 

 from which the matter is regarded at Evesham, where 

 the wide knowledge and the varied qualifications 

 requisite for successful fruit-growing and market-garden- 

 ing are too well appreciated for there to be much con- 

 fidence felt in proposals for the wholesale transfer of 

 town-workers or non-w r orkers to the country. 



Whether or not developments are likely to be effected 

 on quite so broad a scale as this, the Evesham growers 

 think it a matter for regret that the average English 



