28o THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



not to have " passed the wit of man " to discover this 

 without such painful teaching. 



But the war has taught us more besides. In its ignorance 

 the world had in the past set down the agricultural labourer 

 as a " yokel," an unskilled " hand," whose labour could 

 not be highly appraised. However, when the critical time 

 came and people offered indiscriminately to come forward 

 and lend a hand, the question was promptly asked : " Can 

 you do the job ? " When soldiers were pretty freely offered, 

 in 1917, for putting the harvest into ricks, farmers cried 

 out : " But send us skilled thatchers with them, to direct 

 them, or their labour will be thrown away. There was 

 great waste in this way in 1916." And for want of skilled 

 hands the question was put : Where are ploughmen ? 

 Where are skilled sowers — since it was a question whether 

 the drill could be worked on the wet land ? Where are 

 this, that, and the other ? Townsmen had foolishly set 

 down the agricultural labourer, standing before them in a 

 garb absolutely demanded by his calling, in his billycock 

 hat, his red neckerchief, his smock, his tied-up corduroys, 

 and his hobnailed boots, as an ignorant beefwitted clown, 

 with no wits about him, no power of observation in his 

 eyes, no power of reflection in his brain. And by their 

 treatment of the " yokel " agricultural employers had 

 helped to confirm the prejudice. The demands made 

 upon Agricultural Labour in the hour of trial have shown 

 that fact is altogether different from assumption. The 

 agricultural labourer is in many respects as different from 

 the townsman as is, say, the Englishman from the Italian 

 or the Greek. He lives and moves in a different world ; 

 he is called upon to do essentially different work ; his powers 

 of observation and of reflection are necessarily directed to 

 different objects. But he has his wits about him all the 

 same. The very complaint now so often given expres- 

 sion to, that Agricultural Labour is no longer what it used 

 to be — evidently because the best labourers have fled into 

 factories or to the Colonies — shows that labour in agricultural 

 employment, to be useful, must be highly skilled and of 

 such an order that it cannot be readily replaced. He is 



