320 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



down to the lowest grades. And hence not only those 

 scenes of life and gaiety which we admire and sometimes 

 envy, that romance of garden- like fields and trees festooned 

 with vines, but also a richer yield from Mother Earth. And 

 the further such principle was carried into effect the better 

 has it been held that the national interest has been served. 

 In our country, and in it alone, the reverse movement 

 has taken place. Like Naomi, our rural population " went 

 out full and returned empty." The big purse bought up 

 everything. Field was laid to field — first to produce food 

 for sheep, which in their turn were to produce our whilom 

 staple commodity of wool; then to ensure show, influence and 

 social and political power. As in ancient Rome, which 

 perished by its latifundia, there was a thirst to be numbered 

 among the potentiores, the principes loci, who alone had a 

 voice in the direction of affairs. And that position was, 

 as in Rome, dependent upon the possession of land. Human 

 nature, as we see, does not change much with the march 

 of ages. Once the bulk of our Commons had been absorbed 

 by the Manor, by means of Enclosure, what appears to 

 have proved the death-blow had been dealt to independent 

 small cultivation. The countryside wasted away ; country 

 life grew dull ; population became sparse and labour 

 scarce. Wasteful as the established utilisation of Commons 

 was, to the small folk in the country and to the Nation, 

 Commons represented far more than a purely social benefit, 

 or a picturesque feature in rural life. There was economic 

 good in this piece of antiquity, a possibility given to the 

 labouring man to maintain an independent, self-reliant 

 life, and a method of keeping the peasantry attached to 

 the soil. Look at Switzerland with its AUmend and its 

 Alpage in the present day, to see what the Common means 

 to the rural population ! That same AUmend is becoming 

 a powerful factor in rural life, as in part rehabilitating the 

 discarded " Common." We cannot, of course, hope, or 

 even desire, to re-establish the Common precisely as it was. 

 There was great waste in it, and it would be out of keeping 

 with the present age. However common land, more 

 specifically for purposes of pasture, as in Alpage, is felt to 



