THE RURAL PROBLEM 5 



security, but often the barest necessities of life are denied 

 them. The wage of the labourer is scandalously low, his 

 hours of work intolerably long, his chances of recreation 

 negligible. His cottage often belongs to his employer, and 

 however ramshackle, unhealthy, or overcrowded it may be, 

 there is usually no other available for miles around. There is 

 no milk to be bought for his babies, even could he afford to 

 buy it. There is no opening for his sons and daughters. The 

 condition of his existence is one of servility and dependence 

 upon others, against which any relic of spirit he possesses 

 must rebel in vain. 



And yet he knows better than anyone else that much of his 

 suffering is Avanton and unnecessary. He can see that the 

 land around him is either not fully utilised or is put to purely 

 selfish uses which are of no benefit to the community as a 

 whole. He knows that food could be grown on land which is 

 now languishing for lack of capital or enterprise, that produc- 

 tive labour could be employed where now the gamekeeper 

 wanders with his gun and dog. Not until this knowledge of 

 his is borne in upon the convictions of the rest of the com- 

 munity, not until the nation (with its fuller powers and 

 truer sense of proportion) determines to take the rural pro- 

 blem as seriously as he docs, will his unnecessary wrongs be 

 righted, and a weak point be made strong again in the 

 armour of our national life. 



Sir, Horace Plunkett, the greatest agricultural reformer of 

 our time, has maintained that the industrial revolution, as it 

 has taken place in Great Britain and America, has 

 destroyed the healthy relations of town and country popula- 

 tions, and that, in consequence, the civilisation of these 

 countries has become dangerously one-sided. The tendency, 

 as civilisation advances, for industry to displace agriculture, 

 and for the mechanic to replace the peasant, is not neces- 

 sarily regrettable, and it is a tendency which it would be 

 futile to attempt to arrest. But it carries with it the need of 

 new ideals. The picture of a country peopled with a pros- 

 perous peasantry must give way to that of a population 

 mainly of well-paid mechanics and artisans with full access 

 to the land, enjoying with their families the health and 

 beautv which slum life destrovs, the recreation and activities 



