RURAL PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT 9 



nized that ownership is not everything, and that he has only ex- 

 changed a condition of one form of servitude for another. 



Improved land in Great Britain can be rented at a sum which 

 represents nothing more than a reasonable interest on the cost of 

 improvements made by the owner. The writer has had personal 

 experience in Scotland as a farmer, and spent ten years managing, 

 inspecting and valuing rural land in England on behalf of large owners 

 and purchasers. In 1908 he surveyed the rural conditions of three 

 counties for the Board of Agriculture. That experience proved that 

 bare agricultural land frequently produced no revenue to the owner. 

 Apart, therefore, from the "magic of property," which, it is agreed, 

 has a great value, farms can be had as cheaply in Britain as in Canada. 



The British landowner has recognized that he can only keep his 

 tenants by helping them to obtain good roads, social opportunities 

 and cheap money, and by encouraging co-operation and improving the 

 methods of husbandry. Moreover, he has acted as a partner with the far- 

 mer, in keeping up the productive quality of the soil by requiring proper 

 crop rotation, in getting facilities for cheap transportation, and in ob- 

 taining government assistance to keep up a high quality of stock. In 

 areas available for new settlers, the Canadian farmer gets ownership, 

 but he loses other advantages which he regarded too cheaply while he 

 had them. To make farm settlement in this country successful, 

 therefore, we must not only give opportunities to obtain ownership, 

 but the facilities and social conditions which go with tenancy in 

 other countries. Thus, ownership will become an addition to the 

 attractions which are available in these other countries, and not, as 

 at present, an alternative. 



It is as important to Great Britain as it is to Canada that more 

 men and women of British blood, and possessing the ideals and cour- 

 age of British citizens, should be attracted to Canada at the close 

 of the war. It is important to Britain because her outlook in regard 

 to food supply, and in regard to other matters connected with the 

 future destiny of the British Empire, cannot be circumscribed within 

 the narrow limits of the British Isles. Whatever Great Britain may 

 do to improve agricultural development and to make herself more 

 independent of foreign supplies of food it is only in a limited degree 

 that she can artificially promote and carry out that improvement; 

 and owing to the limited area of her land resources she must look 

 more and more to her overseas Dominions for increased production. 



It is in the direction of more intensive cultivation and more 

 scientific production of dairy food, rather than an increased acreage 

 of wheat, that there is most hope of building up agricultural develop- 



