16 OUR ENGLISH LAND MUDDLE. 



him, need from outside their farms. The town 

 stores were drawn upon for clothes and a few 

 groceries, and that was all. Some of the older- 

 fashioned farmers even gristed their own grain, and 

 had their breakfast porridge of home-grown oats. 



Of incalculable national value is such a class 

 of farmer as this, since there is no imaginable 

 blow of fate which can seriously threaten its 

 stability. A war, or some such calamity, may 

 cut them off from their market and make them 

 for a while poor, but it cannot make them 

 hungry. Whatever happens, they are sure of food 

 and some degree of comfort ; and there is among 

 them no economic argument against the full 

 cradle. 



That class of farmer — sometimes tenant, rarely 

 owner — has its counterpart still to-day in Eng- 

 land, and I suppose in the best days of agri- 

 cultural England such a class formed a very 

 large proportion of the population. But it is 

 now a rapidly vanishing class, threatening to 

 become an extinct class. To preserve and 

 restore it would seem to me to be the greater 

 part of the problem of the land in the Mother 

 Country. To encourage and increase it is cer- 



