LACK OF COTTAGES 445 



only, for our millionaires seem to have been trained 

 rather by their practical life than by their educa- 

 tion. Men have left the land because fewer men 

 have been needed per acre with every introduction 

 of machinery ; and indeed it is the better ideal to be 

 able to manage a farm with two men per 100 acres 

 minding machines and earning 303. a week each than 

 with ten men digging or its equivalent at IDS. a week 

 each. Actually the contrast is not so bad as that, 

 but still many farmers waste manual labour because it 

 is comparatively cheap. 



Nowadays two main factors are driving the best of the 

 youngsters away from the farms : the lack of a chance 

 to rise to any sort of a position and the deficiency of 

 cottages. We need not labour the former point, but 

 the provision of more cottages is in many parts of the 

 country the most pressing and also most difficult of 

 problems. By long custom country cottages, whether 

 tied to the farms or not, are let at rents that will not pay 

 a living interest on their cost, and the farmer takes it out 

 by paying lower wages. If every landowner could be 

 compelled to charge 43. or 55. a week for his cottages, 

 and the farmers to raise their wages by a corresponding 

 2s. or 33. a week, it would then be possible to build 

 cottages as an ordinary business proposition ; but any 

 attempt on the part of an individual to raise rents and 

 wages together only results in his men pocketing the 

 higher rate and trying to live at a distance or to crowd 

 in with some one else as lodgers. To build assisted 

 cottages by means of loans or grants to the local 

 authority would only perpetuate a vicious system and 

 a false standard of wages which needlessly enhances 

 the existing glamours of the town. But we see no 

 way at present of forcing people to face facts and of 

 ensuring that a cottage which costs 55. a week to build 



