M. -AGRICULTURE 



265 



Changes in Area under Crop. Million hectares. 



The shrinkage is doubtless no more than a temporary matter, the back- 

 water of the wild fluctuations of prices and values brought about by the 

 war, but it does not promise well for that continued expansion of the 

 cultivated area which the still growing population demands. Indeed, 

 we may detect a new influence at work, the growing disinclination of the 

 civilised peoples to continue in agriculture because of its small and un- 

 certain returns as compared with other occupations. It appears to be 

 a general experience that wherever by the extension of communications 

 tlie industries or commerce come close to agriculture the latter declines 

 and begins to lose its best brains, its capital, and its men. The lure of the 

 cities is proverbial, but the fundamental factor is economic ; unorganised 

 agriculture cannot pay the wages obtainable in the organised industries. 

 The decline in the agricultural popidation of Great Britain and the United 

 States is the most marked, but it is significant that in France, where of 

 all countries the farmer is most protected and prices have been main- 

 tained, the peasants are leaving the land for the growing industries, their 

 places being taken, in the soutli at least, by Italian immigrants. 



The flight from the land is manifest equally among the wage-earners 

 of large-scale agriculture and among the peasants or family farmers in 

 whose hands resides the greater part of the cultivation, whether in the old 

 settled countries of Europe or the newer exploitations of America. Again 

 and again it must be urged that the determining cause is economic ; 

 for the last half-century, save for the abnormal war-years, farming has 

 not paid a return on the capital and labour expended comparable with that 

 obtainable elsewhere. It has been said that even the American farmers 

 of the Middle West, who ciit prices for all the world, made no profits during 

 the last half-century except those derived from. the accretion of land 

 values. And the peasant farmer, who counts neither the capital he 

 has in the business nor the hours of labour he gives to his land, who in 

 Europe is held to the land by secular tradition, finds agriculture unattrac- 

 tive as soon as the growth of industries and the spread of communications 

 render an escape possible. If not the peasant himself, at least the sons 

 look for an easier and less exacting mode of life. 



At this stage it would be impossible to begin to diagnose the causes of 

 the comparative unprofitableness of agriculture. Fundamentally it is 

 due to the weakness of the farmer as a commercial unit ; the smaller the 

 fanner the more ruthlessly does he compete with his neighbours and 

 reduce prices to a bare level of sustenance for his long hours of labour. 



