UNEMPLOYMENT 135 



luxury, and provides him also with the staff of life itself — 



food. 



To neglect the land, then, would be to neglect those means 

 of suhsistence, which are as essential to the human race as are 

 light and air to the growth of plant life, and yet this is 

 precisely what we, as a people, have been doing ever since 

 Cobden and his followers set up in this country a system of 

 economics as unsuited to the needs of human beings — in this 

 or in any other country — as the poisoned rivers of a manu- 

 facturing town are unsuited to all forms of fish life. 



How can it be otherwise ? How can man thrive when he 

 deprives himself of his chief means of subsistence ? He may, 

 by resorting to this or that expedient, dodge for a time the 

 certain results of his ignorance or folly, but, however much he 

 may twist and turn, the inevitable will overtake him at length. 



The inevitable has overtaken this country, and its people 

 have suffered, and are suffering, as no people in these civilised 

 times should be expected to suffer. They are suffering through 

 no fault of their own, but solely through the misguided zeal 

 of a band of manufacturer-reformers, who, chiefly for motives 

 which conduced to their personal interests, sixty odd years 

 ago, persuaded the people to their own undoing. Then, their 

 sufferings are being perpetuated by the followers of a per- 

 nicious fiscal policy, who, to serve political purposes, bolster 

 up an effete agricultural system which has wrought untold 

 harm to national interests, but which, under other conditions, 

 would be capable of confening unquestionable benefits on the 

 people, and of solving once and for all this miserable unem- 

 ployed question which has settled on the face of the country as 

 a deadly blight. 



If there is, however, one thing more than another which 

 should warn the people of the danger they are running, in trust- 

 ing to trades and manufactures as a solution of the Unemployed 

 problem, it is, or should be, the fact that for the last sixty years 

 these means of occupation have utterh/ failed to solve it. 



If there be additional proof required, it should be the 

 startling fact that — Great Britain is not holding her own with 

 other nations in the race for the world's trade. 



But as there is " a silver lining to every cloud," so is there 

 hope in the Land if the people will but realise it. The land 

 can aid them as no other power on this earth can — if they 

 will but trust to it — but if they will not do so, if neither 

 this hope, nor the manifestations of national danger just 

 referred to, fail to rouse them to a sense of the gravity of the 

 position ; then a dark day will, indeed, dawn for England. 



