CHAPTER XXIV 

 THE HUMAN ELEMENT 



I AM perfectly aware of the fact, to which some of my 

 readers may point, that such proposals as those I have 

 advanced would not fully solve the problem of the 

 ' unemployed ' in the towns. They might, it will be 

 said, help to check the rural exodus, and also provide 

 outlets for the settlement of a certain number of towns- 

 people in the country, but the larger number of those 

 who are crying out for work in the towns would still 

 remain there. 



All this I frankly admit ; but my immediate purpose 

 was to discuss the problem from an agricultural or 

 economic rather than from that social or philanthropic 

 standpoint under which the absorption of the unem- 

 ployed in general naturally falls. There are reasons 

 why I feel bound to concur in the views of Dean Stubbs 

 when he says in his book on ' The Land and the 

 Labourers ' : 



Nearly twenty years' close intimacy with the conditions, social 

 and economic, of rural life have taught me that success in agri- 

 culture, even on a small scale, demands qualities of head and hand 

 and heart which, to say the least, it is quite idle to expect from a 

 merely miscellaneous company of the loafers and slummers and 

 labour failures of town life. It is too often forgotten by the glib 

 land reformers of our city debating clubs that the efficient agri- 

 cultural labourer is not in reality the dull chaw-bacon sort of 

 person of a Punch cartoon, but one of the most highly-skilled of 



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