M. — AGRICULTURE. 203 



amateur and professional gardeners addressed themselves to the work 

 of producing food with remarkable energy and success. No less remark- 

 able and successful was the work of the old and new allotment holders, 

 so much so indeed that at the time of the Armistice there were nearly 

 a million and a-half allotment holders cultivating upwards of 125,000 

 acres of land : an allotment for every five households in England and 

 Wales. It is a pathetic commentary on the Peace that Vienna should 

 find itself obliged to do now what was done here during the war — 

 namely, convert its parks and open spaces into allotments in order to 

 supplement a meagre food supply. 



This brief review of war-time intensive cultivation would be in- 

 complete were it to contain no reference to intensive cultivation by the 

 armies at home and abroad. From small beginnings, fostered by the 

 distribution by the Eoyal Horticultural Society of supplies of vegetable 

 seeds and plants to the troops in France, army cultivation assumed 

 under the direction of Lord Harcourt's Army Agricultural Committee 

 extraordinarily large dimensions : a bare summary must suffice here, 

 but a full account may be found in the report presented by the Com- 

 mittee to the Houses of Parliament and published as a Parliamentary 

 Paper. 



In 1918 the armies at home cultivated 5,869 acres of vegetables. In 

 the summer of that year the camp and other gardens of our armies in 

 France were producing 100 tons of vegetables a day. These gardens 

 yielded, in 1918, 14,000 tons of vegetables, worth, according to my 

 estimate, a quarter of a million pounds sterling, but worth infinitely 

 more if measured in terms of benefit to the health of the troops. 



As the result of General Maude's initiative, the forces in Meso- 

 potamia became great gardeners, and in 1918 produced 800 tons of 

 vegetables, apart altogether from the large cultivations carried out by 

 His Majesty's Forces in that wonderfully fertile land. In the same 

 year the forces at Salonika had about 7,000 acres under agricultural and 

 horticultural crops, and raised produce which effected a saving of over 

 50,000 shipping tons. 



Even from this brief record it will, I believe, be conceded that 

 intensive cultivation played a useful and significant part in the war: 

 what, it may be asked, is the part which it is destined' to play in the 

 luture? So far as I am able to learn, there exist in this country two 

 schools of thought or opinion on the subject of the prospects 

 of intensive cultivation, the optimistic and the pessimisjtdc school. 

 The former sees visions of large communities of small cultivators 

 colonising the countryside of England, increasing and multiplying both 

 production and themselves, a numerous, prosperous and happy^ people 

 and a sure shield in time of war against the menace of submarines and 

 starvation. Those on the other hand who take the pessimistic view, 

 point to the many examples of smallholders who ' plough with pain 

 their native lea and reap the labour of their hands ' with remarkably 

 small profit to themselves or to the community — smallholders like 

 those in parts of Warwickshire, who can just manage by extremely 

 hard labour to maintain themselves, or like those in certain districts of 

 Norfolk, who have let their holdings tumble down into com and who 



