6o Agriculture and the Community. 



increase production on economic lines to enable the 

 workers to improve their position. To ensure this we 

 must have more capital and sufficient scope to offer 

 prospects to workers without capital to engage in the 

 industry on their own behalf. There must be openings 

 for the young people who are willing to train for the more 

 responsible technical and scientific branches. There must 

 be openings for the young people who are willing to 

 improve their craft and desire to employ their talents in 

 more specialised positions. We have been training 

 technical and scientific workers in our agricultural 

 colleges, but our agricultural industry cannot absorb 

 them. It makes no appeal to the worker who wants to 

 be more than a ploughman or a cattleman or a shepherd. 

 Nor is it likely we can do any better so long as the industry 

 is a small scale capitalist industry. The higher branches 

 and the wider opportunities are not open to those who 

 have ability ; they are the preserve of those who have 

 capital. We cannot hope to develop a progressive industry 

 on those lines, and we cannot expect it to attract or retain 

 the best type of workers, technical or manual. 



National Responsibility. 



The first condition of any effective change in agriculture 

 is that the community must take the industry much more 

 seriously than it has done. It cannot afford any longer 

 to leave it the play of the economic interests of land- 

 owners, farmers, and workers. That was the policy of 

 the second half of the nineteenth century, a natural re- 

 action from the system of protection of which the Corn 

 Laws were the most outstanding feature. Very tentatively 



