go THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



the crucial point of the system, to which we shall have 

 to apply either a healing salve or else the operating knife. 

 In all other callings we have got beyond the old humdrum 

 plodding of the mere craftsman. The old weaver, the old 

 spinner, the old nailer, the old engineer are gone — super- 

 seded by more instructed, better equipped men. Successfully 

 to carry on any calling to-day we need men with brightness 

 of intellect, quickness of apprehension, keen power of dis- 

 tinguishing between what is good and what is bad, in one 

 word, men of complete education. No professional man, 

 no manufacturer, or other industrialist, no merchant or 

 trader could to-day get on in the world on such humdrum 

 knowledge as the average farmer brings to his work in his 

 own calling. Only in Agriculture have we stood still. And 

 when landlords, already too insistent upon their right of 

 dealing with their " property " according to their own 

 fancy, persist in entrusting their broad acres — which they 

 hold under the supreme ownership of the Nation — to men 

 so little qualified as these, is it surprising that remiieurs 

 of the very new school cry out for " Land Nationalisation " 

 as a means of ensuring that land shall be turned to account 

 for the national benefit — or, as the powerful Co-operative 

 Community has put it, that the direction of National Agri- 

 culture should be placed in the hands, not of producers, 

 but of consumers, who would stand on no etiquette with 

 incapable husbandmen, but promptly get rid of whosoever 

 was not equal to his job, in a rougher way than is now usual ? 

 We shall have to recognise that the present war has given 

 a powerful push to Socialism at almost all points of the econ- 

 omic compass, but more particularly at this. What is the 

 Government management of important branches of trade on 

 behalf of the Nation, to the ehmination of profit and placing 

 goods on the market at no more than cost price, other than 

 a form of collectivist handling of the " instruments of pro- 

 duction," which Socialists have made their main objective ? 

 And the fact that, notwithstanding such interference, " pro- 

 fiteering " remains, is calculated to impart a still further 

 stimulus, because it suggests that even a Coalition Govern- 

 ment, formed in the main on honrgcoislmQS, is not fully equal 



