AGRARIAN POLITICS. 91 



large surplus of women to remain unmarried in other parts of 

 the country. 



Now the war has robbed the nation of many of its strongest 

 and healthiest males, and it is therefore more important than ever 

 for the physical well-being of the race that the mothers of the 

 next generation should be the healthiest and strongest women. 

 Even apart from this fact, and apart from all theories of sexual 

 selection, it is surely obvious that happy social life requires a 

 fairly even distribution of the sexes throughout the country. 

 The bearing of all this upon the agricultural problem cannot be 

 mistaken. Agriculture is necessarily carried on away from the 

 towns, and before the war, was so peculiarly a male occupation 

 in this country that a common feature of English society at the 

 time of the last Census was the existence of an actual surplus of 

 males in the rural districts and a great preponderance of females 

 in the towns. Agriculture, the great industry of rural England, 

 provided employment, with negligible exceptions, for men and 

 boys only ; and the girls got their living in the towns as factory 

 hands or as domestic servants. Moreover there must have 

 been a tendency for the strongest girls from the villages to 

 seek urban employment, while the delicate girls remained at 

 home to become the wives of the farm labourers. The conclusion 

 is obvious. The development of Agriculture, if it continues 

 to be almost entirely a man's trade, will carry this un- 

 healthy distribution of the sexes still further and to that 

 extent will be socially disadvantageous. It will of course 

 be replied that in the future women may be employed more 

 extensively in the fields or that industries which employ women 

 may be established in the villages. But even so you have not 

 got rid of the difficulty. Will not the arduous work of the 

 fields be inimical to motherhood or at least to that care of 

 home and children which is so necessary to the happiness of 

 the working man and so important for the future of the race ? 

 And as regards the establishment of new women's industries 

 in country districts, either those industries will be economically 

 desirable and self-supporting or they will not. If they are a 

 business proposition and can be made self-supporting, such 

 industries should be established in any case. But then we should 

 have an increase of rural population without agricultural develop- 

 ment, and the possibility of increasing the rural population in 

 this way diminishes the force of the social argument that we 

 must develop Agriculture, even beyond the economic maximum, 

 in order to increase the number of persons who dwell in the 

 country. On the other hand, if the new women's industries 

 cannot be self-supporting, they must involve additional expense 

 a further misdirection of labour and capital and in that case 

 the need of establishing such industries to counteract the 



