14 Agriculture and the Community. 



management of the land as an agricultural subject. The 

 position has been very moderately stated by Sir Daniel 

 Hall in " A Pilgrimage of British Farming " (p. 437) : 

 " If we consider the men who are engaged in this business 

 of agriculture, we must conclude that the owners, how- 

 ever kindly and helpful to their tenants, are yet deficient 

 in leadership. There is nowadays no one to set beside 

 Coke of Norfolk or the landowners who did pioneering 

 work in the second quarter of the nineteenth century ; 

 almost the only working part they take in agriculture 

 consists in the breeding of pedigree stock, and that rather 

 as a form of social competition than the improvement of 

 farming. The great opportunities of leadership they might 

 exercise in the way of drawing their tenants into co- 

 operative marketing and purchase, or improved methods 

 of farming, are rarely or never exercised ; at their worst, 

 landlords become mere rent receivers and must inevitably 

 become crowded out unless they take some higher view 

 of their function. " 



Five years later the same writer in "Agriculture after 

 the War " (p. 66) sums up the position very tersely: 

 " The one thing the landowning class in this country have 

 lacked has been technical knowledge ; they have not 

 treated landowning as a career nor qualified themselves 

 to give a lead to their tenants. Nor have their agents 

 brought a more enlightened outlook to their profession. 

 The root of the evil lies in the owners' want of technical 

 knowledge of the land."* 



* It is significant that the same criticism was made by Caird in 

 the middle of last century, cf. " English Agriculture," 1852, 2nd 

 edition, pp. 492 et seq., and " The Landed Interest," 1878, p. 103. 



