The Organisation oj the Industry). 21 



invested in farming, are, and will always be, as a rule, 

 less than the profits or interest obtainable in other 

 businesses. The man who has, say, ;^5,ooo or ;/J"io,ooo 

 to invest in a business from which he proposes to make a 

 livelihood, will generally get a smaller remuneration for 

 his personal work and a lower return for his capital than 

 if he invested the same amount of capital and devoted his 

 personal energy to another form of commercial enterprise. 

 The reason is clear and well-recognised. The occupation 

 of a farmer has attractions to a very large number of 

 persons apart from the amount of money to be made by it. 

 So long as men prefer life on a farm with moderate income, 

 to life in an office or shop with a much larger income, so 

 long will the average profit on turnover or the average 

 interest on capital be less in the business of farming than 

 in other businesses involving the investment of capital." 



Sir A. D. Hall, writing in 1910, in " A Pilgrimage of 

 British Farming " (pp. 146-7) is even more confident as 

 to the position of the industry : — " But if the methods of 

 British agriculture are very diverse, they seemed uniformly 

 to be meeting with a very fair measure of success, for one 

 could not but conclude that the industry as a whole was in 

 a prosperous condition and had healthily and stably 

 recovered from the great depression that lay upon it as 

 recently as fifteen years earlier. Our views were doubtless 

 coloured by the fact that we almost inevitably saw one of 

 the leading farmers in each district we visited, and, again, 

 did not meet with the number of other men who, from 

 lack of business aptitude or some initial handicap, were 

 still struggling desperately to make both ends meet. 



