LABOUR. 3oq 



impressment. There is much else that wc might do to 

 make agricultural labour more attractive. 



There is a social side to country life which affects 

 labourers above all men and which wants to be studied 

 as well as the economic. 



" Nothing short of a comprehensive attempt to make 

 rural life profitable, healthful, comfortable and attractive," 

 so writes the Hon. D. F. Houston, Secretary of Agriculture 

 in the United States, in one of his most recent Annual 

 Reports, " will solve the problem. It is the only sure way 

 of retaining in the rural districts an adequate number of 

 efficient and contented people. . . . While we labour to. 

 increase the supply of material things, we cannot neglect 

 the higher things — the intellectual and social sides of rural 

 life. The conservation and development of the people is 

 the greatest problem of conservation confronting us." 

 There is an echo of Mr. Roosevelt's instructions, as Presi- 

 dent of the United States, to the Rural Life Commission, 

 which he appointed, in this. We are endeavouring to 

 cultivate the social side in a way perfectly appropriate to 

 past times, but out of harmony with the spirit of the present 

 day, namely by patronage. There are plenty of good 

 people wilHng and anxious to provide for the social wants 

 of rural folk by clubs and entertainments, cricket and other 

 meetings and all that, a sort of rural "going slumming." 

 But there is one feature about this which robs it of more 

 than half its grace, and that is the tone of condescension. 

 Nothing could be better than that classes should be brought 

 freely together and made to mix, more particularly in the 

 country, where population is not excessive and where people 

 billeted side by side instinctively learn to be neighbourh'. 

 However that should be, not on the footing of benefactors 

 and beneficiaries, but on that of pro hac vice equals. The 

 great German philanthropist Raiffeisen, who has done so 

 much for the rural poor, not of his country alone, understood 

 this when he organised his little co-operative societies, 

 which have grown to be collectively a large army, benefiting 

 small cultivators by millions, and at the same time also— 

 and that is their chief merit— generating a spirit and a 



