DISCOURAGERS AND PESSIMISTS 227 



The land will be reserved for Uie sober, thrifty, diligent, and 

 intelligent citizen, to whom every encouragemeut and State aid 

 will be accorded, but to no o/hcrs ; and if, out of the vast 

 numbers of English people who would gladly settle on the 

 land if reasonable opportunities were oHered, there cannot be 

 got together a great, capable agricultural population, the world, 

 for the first time in history, will witness an unique economical 

 phenomenon. 



New Manufacturing Industries find no Lack of Labour 



Compared with the honourable eld of agriculture, most of 

 our scientific discoveries, tlie invention of mechanical contriv- 

 ances and their application to manufacturing processes, are but 

 things of yesterday — of a brief sixty years or so — and yet there 

 is no lack of skilled labourers in our great urban industries. 

 If millions of capable workers can spring up with so rapid a 

 growth as to fulfil the exigent and difficult demands of new 

 manufacturing industries, it is obvious there cannot possibly be 

 any difficulty in getting men to fulfil the requirements of a 

 simple industry like agriculture — with which man has been 

 familiar even before the dawn of history. 



There is, one way and another, so much premeditated or 

 unconscious hostility to agriculture in this country from so 

 many directions that the wonder is, not that it is in a languishing 

 condition, but that it is alive at all. 



That it docs exist is due neither to Governments nor to the 

 people, but to agriculturists themselves who, despite the cruel 

 blows dealt to their industry by the administrations of the last 

 sixty years, have held to it tenaciously. This fact alone offers 

 the best proof of the stability of agriculture, of its indestructi- 

 bility and, therefore, of the necessity of regarding it as the 

 primal industry ; and it must be clear to all who will not permit 

 their vision to be obscured by political prejudice or party bias, 

 that if agriculture has not entirely succumbed to the destructive 

 processes which have been directed against it for more than 

 half a century, and it is still by far the greatest industry of the 

 day, the greatest employer of labour, the greatest Life-giver and 

 the cleanest, wholesomest, and most manly industry of them all : 

 it must necessarily be the industrial fulcrum upon which all 

 other industries move and rotate. 



Much is being done to make the people acquainted with 

 these things, and the sooner their eyes are opened to them, the 

 sooner will the dawn of better times appear. 



