ITS LESSONS AND ITS WARNINGS 81 



The miserable competitive system, with its 

 under-cutting to secure trade, would be increased. 

 To adopt this course would be to waste the 

 money of the subscribers to the Fund. One 

 direction in which the money would be well and 

 usefully spent is in the establishment of a model 

 farm or farms where returned wounded soldiers 

 might be taught by Belgian agricultural refugees 

 the methods of intensive cultivation, which they 

 so well understand. In their spare time the 

 cultivators and their families could also engage 

 in one or other of the many home industries 

 which in former times added so much to their 

 earnings and to their comfort. Home employ- 

 ment of this character, being purely supple- 

 mentary, does not come into the same category 

 as the competitive labour of the factory. In 

 fact the land reforms advocated, taken as a 

 whole, would be of such a productive character 

 as eventually to pay the whole expenses of the 

 war. It was out of savings of the French 

 peasants mainly that the heavy mulct imposed 

 by the Germans after the Franco-German war 

 was paid. 



Any estimate of the amount of money that 

 could be got out of the wasted land of our 



