5G THE RURAL PROBLEM 



resource other than his weekly silver. Whatever makes the 

 labourer independent tends to help wages up ; and the 

 smallest scrap of land, let alone a small holding with a county 

 council cottage, turns the farm hand into a man. 



As for village trade, it is scarcely necessary to point out 

 that the small holder — at any rate till his co-operative society 

 is fully at work — is a customer (and a good one) for all that 

 the village tradesmen supply : he has horses to be shod, a 

 cart for the wheelwright, baskets and string, pigs' food and 

 hens' food, and better clothing for himself and his family. 

 Even if he buys co-operatively, the carriage has to be done 

 by existing methods. Far more money circulates through a 

 twenty-acre small holding with farm buildings, a cottage 

 and intensive culture, than is turned over by an agricultural 

 labourer on 15s. a week and the same twenty acres in grass 

 feeding cattle or arable growing corn. 



Socialism has been defined as giving people what they 

 want. Some who believe that good things are always dis- 

 agreeable, and retain their faith in the inborn depravity of 

 humanity, demur to the definition; but provided it be not 

 pressed too far, or taken too literally, it is on the whole sound. 

 Now there is no sort of doubt whatever that the people 

 already in the country want land. Every village is full of 

 men who are eager for the chance of hiring anything, from a 

 little allotment up to a small farm of fifty acres. They want 

 to stay in the country. They want to grow their own 

 potatoes and keep their own pigs and fowls. They want to 

 work for themselves the land they have spent their lives — so 

 far — in tilling for others. 



It is a grand thing to satisfy that widespread, deep-rooted 

 desire for land,* that genuine land hunger of the British 

 peasantry — and not of the peasantry alone, but of the small 

 tradesmen and artisans of the villages and country towns. 

 The people of England will be healthier, wealthier, wiser if 

 more of them are in contact with the soil, not as mere day- 

 labourers toiling for others, but as occupiers at a fixed rent 

 farming for themselves. 



* Not a desire for ownership of land necessarily, as Mr. Belloe and 

 his school mistakenly assert. 



