REMEDIES SUGGESTED. 79 



buying and selling." There is more. Evidently the present 

 time is a time for intensive farming — the more intensive 

 the better. However, we have still a considerable quantity 

 of poor extensive husbandry. " In many parts of the 

 country " — it is still Mr. Hall speaking — " it is clear that 

 the farmer is occupying more land than he can properly 

 manage with the capital at his disposal. During the depres- 

 sion men who could in any way make a living by farming 

 got hold of comparatively large tracts of land, after putting 

 several holdings together ; by cutting down expenses they 

 succeeded in obtaining a working profit " (much of our 

 land being under-rented) " off their extended areas, and 

 though prices have latterly justified a more intensive policy, 

 they still continue to let the land go to waste with a minimum 

 of effort on their part." Clearly in this case also " their 

 personal profit does not coincide with the national interest." 

 We have it on the authority of the Food Production Com- 

 mittee that our land, if properly farmed, might produce 

 two or three times what it does now. However, giving a 

 bonus per bushel is not the way to make it do so. 



Evidently the point at which we fail is not, in ordinary 

 times, the price of corn — which Mr. Hall found sufficient 

 in ordinary times at 36s. for wheat — but the farmer who 

 grows too little of it to the acre. And our reforming policy 

 will have to be addressed to him and to his deficient capacity, 

 rather than to the product of his indifferent labour — at 

 the cost of others who in their own vocations and callings 

 do their work sufficiently well and do not deserve to be 

 penalised. 



Seeing our Agriculture in such bad plight, one feels tempted 

 to ask, though I do not remember having ever heard the 

 question put forward in any other quarter : How is it that 

 our Agriculture has sunk down into this sad state of decay, 

 at the very time when Agriculture elsewhere all round has 

 forged ahead as if by miraculous propulsion ? For it is 

 not a question merely between ourselves and fortunate 

 Germany. Mr. Middleton has told the story of Germany's 

 rapid and wholesale uprising, altering the condition of her 

 Agriculture really beyond recognition. Whoever be the 



