218 Appendix I 



land 1 . Mrs Wilkins (Miss L. Jebb) put the case more wisely when she 

 said 2 : "I do not much believe in bringing town people out of the towns 

 to the country, but that is a very different thing from bringing back a man 

 to his native district, where he has been in the farming or market-gardening 

 line in his youth, and returns to it." 



But even this limited prejudice against townspeople hardly seems well 

 founded so long as many examples can be found of successful small holders 

 who have come from the towns and were of the towns. Mr Pratt, whose 

 book has already been cited, and who is a well-known writer on 

 agricultural subjects (he has explored the whole of rural England), takes 

 a broader view of the matter. "The ordinary 'unemployed' of our large 

 towns, and the ne'er-do-wells of urban life in general, are not the type of men 

 who could be settled on the land straight off as small holders, whatever else 

 might be done with them." But he enumerates a variety of " desirable town 

 types," and adds : " Starting with the assumption that the townsmen in 

 question were alike intelligent, energetic, and determined to succeed, there 

 ought to be no insuperable difficulty in the way of their acquiring, within 

 a reasonable time, a sufficiency of knowledge... to be able to make, at least, 

 a living" out of agriculture. "As a matter of fact, some of the greatest 

 successes achieved in several of these minor industries of late years have been 

 won by enterprising men from the towns 3 ." 



The questions necessarily arise in this connection : What is the relation 

 of these two most important classes of settlers, the agricultural labourers and 

 the industrial workers, one to another ? and, What is the comparative import- 

 ance of the two groups ? 



The attraction of the land for non-agricultural sections of the population 

 at the present day is by no means exclusively to be traced to a love for 

 "mother earth," or a longing to go "back to the land" for its own sake. 

 If this were the determining motive, its results must have made themselves 

 evident long ago, whereas this return to the country is a phenomenon of quite 

 recent date. The movement is certainly not less due to the fact that the 

 re-organisation of English agriculture has created conditions which seem to be 

 particularly well suited to men who have been brought up to trade or 

 industry. The smaller branches of agricultural production, which have now 

 become the very basis of English agriculture, make quite different demands 

 on the farmer than would be made by a small holding devoted to corn 

 supplemented by stock-feeding. The small farms of the eighteenth century 

 also sold fruit, vegetables, eggs, poultry and so forth. But they sold them 

 for the most part to customers in their own village or in the nearest market. 

 The markets of to-day are as a rule far from the small holder himself, and 

 the old personal relation of farmer and customer is gone. The farmer has 



1 Small Holdings Report, 1906, Minutes, p. 474. 2 Ibid., qu. 7914. 



3 Pratt, op. cit. pp. 306 ff. 



