M.— AGRICULTURE. 249 



their efloits will be nut national in their scope, but isolated and sporadic. 

 In this connection the existence and growing strength of the Central 

 Landowners' Association is a welcome augury of future corporate 

 efficiency. Composed exclusively of agiicultural landowners, and rigidly 

 excluding even land agents and professional advisers from its ranks, 

 it already has local branches in all but two of the counties of England 

 and Wales, and is beginning to enter into friendly negotiations with 

 similar sectional organisations of farmers and agricultural workers for 

 the advancement of the interests, both national gnd local, ol the 

 industry as a whole. While primarily a political (although a non- 

 partisan) association, its objects are not merely politically defensive, 

 but to a growing extent economic and constructive. In any agrarian 

 movement in the future it seems likely to play a conspicuous and useful 

 part, and to help in cementing the solidarity of agricultural forces, 

 without which continuous agricultural progress is difficult of attainment. 



What is most needed in rural Britain to-day is pride on the part of 

 landowners, great and small, in their class, and a consciousness of 

 their beneficent and reconstructive power, coupled with a stolid deter- 

 mination to play their part — the leading part — with knowledge and 

 sympathy in the building up of a well -organised and mutually helpful 

 agricultural community, undeterred by transient difficulties, and un- 

 shaken by the temptation to evade their high responsibilities by the 

 entire alienation of their ancestral estates, or by evoking Government aid 

 in the solution of economic problems which they alone can best solve. 

 Their traditions are great, but their future destiny is greater, if they 

 have but the vision, the courage, and, above all, the will to press reso- 

 lutely forward towards the goal to which public duty and material 

 advantage alike point the way. 



But nO' policy, however prudent, can gain public approbation and 

 endorsement in the twentieth century which discounts the human 

 factor — which in fact does not, in conformity with Jeremy Bentham's 

 doctrine of ' Utilitarianism,' conduce to ' the greatest happiness of the 

 greatest number.' Upon the prosperity of the industry depends the 

 remuneration of the worker and his access to domestic comforts beyond 

 the bare necessaries of life. Upon it depends the maintenance of the 

 social and recreative side of village life. The disruption of landed estates 

 is often accompanied by social disorganisation of the village community 

 and stagnation of those activities and interests which afford an in- 

 vigorating alternative to the routine of the wage-earner's toil, and tend 

 to enhance his occupational keenness and efficiency. If, then, the wel- 

 fare, economic and social, of the rural population rests ultimately upon 

 that of the industry which affords them employment, and if this in 

 turn depends upon the wise leadership of the landowning class, may not 

 the moral ' Utilitarianism ' of Bentham be combined with the commer- 

 cial utilitarianism of the twentieth century, and the decadence of the 

 landowner be deemed to be synonymous with, or at least a prelude to, 

 that of the rural worker ? If so, it will not be untrue — but may it never 

 be necessary — (corrupting Goldsmith's famous couplet) to say : — 



' 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 

 Where wealth accumulates and squires decay. ' 



