•218 BRITAIN FOR THE BRITON 



where these natural aspirations for advancement will find full 

 scope. 



" Why should our young people be kept back in the race of 

 life ? " it is asked. Education has opened their eyes to life's 

 possibilities, they contend, and it is but right and proper that 

 they should gravitate to the towns, and there find those freer 

 facilities for improving their conditions of life, which are more 

 likely to be met with in the great centres of population. 



Then there is the school whicli contends that the land is 

 hopeless as an industry because it does not pay, and that you 

 cannot expect people to grind out their lives amid dull sur- 

 roundings, in hard dreary toil, without being able to make a 

 decent living. " Why should they ? " they ask ; " and how can 

 you expect any man to devote his life to any calling out of 

 which he is not likely to make a fairly good living ? " 



Then come those who ridicule the " Back to the Land " 

 cry, and contentl that the vast majority of the people would 

 rather 'lud go Ijack to the land, and that, if they did, they 

 would be sure to make a mess of it. 



" How can you expect a city clerk and a girl typist, for 

 example, to take on a small farm and conduct it to a successful 

 issue ? " they say ; and to unthinking, uncritical minds this does 

 seem to be somewliat of a problem. First appearances are, 

 however, proverbially deceptive, and, like many things, this 

 question will assume other aspects on clear examination. 



Nor should we overlook that well-known section of the 

 community which belongs to the school of " experts," who love 

 to demonstrate by all the laws of this, that, and the other, that 

 British agriculture is impossible, and that the land is practically 

 a negligible quantity. 



The Batteries of Science and Agriculture 



Among this group may be found professors of political 

 economy and other cults, who will prove by all the laws of 

 science, and by every other conceivable ism that can be called 

 to their aid, tliat it is cheaper to import your wheat from the 

 far off plains of Western Australia, or from the remote Xorthern 

 Provinces of Canada, than to grow it at your own doors. This 

 school is well armed with all the up-to-date weapons of polemical 

 warfare, and when it charges its guns with deductive and 

 inductive logic, and those terrible figures which prove anything 

 or nothing, and trains them on the public mind, the people 

 succumb at once. 



The ordinary " man-in-the-street " can no more stand against 

 a well-directed fire from the statistical batteries of political 



