The Future of the Farm Worker. ii3 



organisation and collective action, and some time must 

 elapse before they can evolve a corporate existence. I am 

 content to mark the trend and to state the claim, leaving 

 to time the working out of the particular method that 

 may be adopted. 



Nor is it my intention to outline any programme of 

 immediate reforms in the conditions of the workers, or to 

 discuss such proposals as profit-sharing, about which we 

 hear so much in these days. The workers are well enough 

 able to state their claims and will do so as opportunity 

 and the need arise. There is one reform, however, upon 

 which the community would be well to insist in its own 

 interest, and that is the abolition of the tied house. Here 

 the rural worker labours under a disability which does 

 more to hamper his freedom and to deny him the status 

 of a citizen than any other condition. It is not merely 

 that the tied house is usually a bad house. In the nature 

 of things it will always be more difficult to apply the 

 ordinary housing legislation to the tied houses because the 

 occupiers have not the same power to insist on decent 

 standards being maintained. The worst defect of the tied 

 house system is that it makes any real freedom impossible 

 in rural districts. Where the tied house system is general, 

 the workers are under the power of the farmers, who are 

 never diffident about applying their power. They may 

 never have to use their power openly but it is always there 

 and it is always in the back of the mind of the workers 

 whenever they make any effort to alter conditions. Only 

 those who have been associated with the workers in any 

 efforts they have made to improve their conditions can 

 know the real power the control of the housing gives the 



