18 THE POLICY OF THE PLOUGH 



ness — ^if only the digging of fields were well enough paid. 

 There is after all nothing new in this. Horace des- 

 cribed with a delicious irony in the Erodes the sensitive 

 passion of the Roman usurer, Alfius, for country scenes 

 and the joys of farming. It is the common delight in 

 contrasts which makes the countryman sigh for the 

 town and the townsman for the country. 



The dislike of our country-side, which impels the 

 sharpest boys and girls to the towns and to the 

 Dominions, is at once a deplorable and an intelligible 

 fact. It must be examined, it must be considered 

 seriously, and it must be met reasonably, if the land is 

 to be cultivated by a contented and prosperous popula- 

 tion. The numbers of the strictly agricultural popula- 

 tion in England and Wales, in the forty years 1871- 

 1911 (males from boys of ten upwards), decreased 16 

 per cent. ; that is to say by more than 200,000. Yet 

 in the same period the population of the whole of 

 England and Wales increased by 67 per cent.* 



It is the dullness of village life, not the dullness of 

 agriculture, which makes men and women, boys and 

 girls, flee to places where shop windows glare on the 

 pavements at night, where streets are lighted like ball- 

 rooms, and the cinema palaces provide their lurid 

 attractions in every thoroughfare. The recreative 

 side of viUage life can and must be organised. 



1 Minority Report, para. 18. 



