118 OUR ENGLISH LAND MUDDLE. 



Now to give the lads of the poor the chance 

 of agricultural apprenticeship would be to help 

 to solve two problems at once — to cut off at its 

 source one stream which feeds the unemployed ; 

 and to provide for the land what it most of all 

 needs — a supply of intelligent labour. There 

 would be no fear, at the outset, that these 

 training farms would be overcrowded. 



A thorny problem would be that of recon- 

 ciling the innovations of a modern scientific 

 system of agricultural education to the present 

 system, with its rule-of-thumb methods and 

 its stubborn conservatism. Your British farmer 

 is, as a rule, a sturdy objector to " new-fangled ' 

 ways. Some few of him almost starved in the 

 early days of Australian settlement, because he 

 and Nature kept up a stubborn disagreement 

 about the conditions of culture proper to Aus- 

 tralian soil and climate, he insisting to almost 

 his last gasp that land which would not grow 

 crops under English conditions was therefore 

 hopelessly sterile under all conditions. Yet the 

 British farmer on British soil, with his stubborn 

 yeoman courage rooted in inherited traditions 

 about that soil, is far too valuable an element 



