FOKEWOKD vii 



lip3, shows that most people reahze this. The new structure 

 may be better or worse than the old, but the old one has 

 been so much shaken that we shall have the labour and the 

 pain of building a new one. Science may do much in giving 

 us new methods ; but in agriculture the determining factors 

 are human, and experience shows that history alone gives the 

 key to the human factor. If we know what men have done 

 before in given circumstances, and how they did it, we know 

 what they can do again* 



This book, therefore, comes most opportunely. We all 

 wish that the agricultural reconstruction necessitated by the 

 War shall give us a better and a happier country hfe than we 

 had before. Messrs. Faber and Hertel show by what means 

 Denmark started out from a humbler beginning than, let us 

 hope, we shall be called upon to start from, and ended with 

 a degree of prosperity that we should be happy to attain. 

 The book is not, so to speak, a picture, but rather a working 

 model with complete diagrams. We are given a detailed 

 account of the various societies, the points where they proved 

 defective, how the defects were remedied, and what measure 

 of final success was achieved. 



In solving our own problem we shall not necessarily use 

 the same model; we are more Hkely to follow our national 

 bent and improvise or design one adapted to our own special 

 conditions. But the Danish model here described has proved 

 an extremely potent constructive implement, and we shall do 

 well to study it closely. 



The essential feature of the Danish method is co-operation. 

 The prodigious effect that combination of effort by the whole 

 body of producers can exert in increasiiijg output, in cheapen- 

 ing cost of production, in improving the quality and value 

 of thB produce, and in ameliorating the lot of the labourer, 

 are shown by the statistics abundantly scattered throughout 

 the book. During the period when Danish agriculture was 

 making great progress, British agriculture gained little or 

 nothing in prosperity; it first declined and then rose, but 

 probably not beyond its original starting point* The British 

 method, in short, proved less capable of adaptation to new 

 and adverse conditions than the Danish. Critics may argue 



h 



