M.— AGRICULTURE. 205 



these institutions, and by a greater appreciation on the part of those 

 whom they are designed to serve. 



So far in this scheme of vocational training only the actual farmers 

 have been considered ; nothing has been done to meet the needs of the 

 manual labourer, and not very much to give the landlord a training 

 suitable to his position as one of the partners in the industry. 



The case of the manual worker is one of most urgent need ; little or 

 nothing is done to give him or her any kind of vocational training, and 

 this in spite of the fact that the whole position of the industry at the 

 present time, more than ever before, depends upon the efficiency of the 

 labour unit. This aspect of agricultural education was dealt with by 

 Mr. Duncan both at the Oxford Meeting and subsequently in an article 

 contributed to the Scottish Journal of Agriculture, 3 and it appears from 

 this that no educational effort is being made to make the manual worker 

 more efficient or to enable him to increase the value of his output. Mr. 

 Orwin 4 has recently stated that the lad who remains on farm work 

 definitely occupies a lower social position than those of his own age and 

 district who seek the more highly remunerated work that can be obtained 

 in the towns. Wireless and the motor-bus have done much to enliven 

 rural conditions, but they really only succeed in emphasising the super- 

 ficial undesirability of country life, country wages, and a country outlook. 

 As Mr. Duncan has pointed out, until wages are higher, and until the 

 skill of the worker enables him to earn those higher wages, agriculture 

 will always be left with the more inefficient and the less active-minded 

 of the countryside. The difficulties in the way of rendering labour more 

 efficient are very great ; the tasks to be carried out are so various, the 

 possibilities of the use of machinery so limited, and the effective over- 

 seeing, which is responsible for much of the success in other industries, 

 is almost impossible. The comparative failure of agricultural trade unions 

 means that there is not the continual pressure for improvement that there 

 is elsewhere. If labour became more efficient the result would be either 

 that the same amount of work could be done in the same time by a smaller 

 number of men, or a larger amount of work done in the same time by the 

 same or a smaller number of men. 



Now extensive agriculture in the newer countries is characterised by 

 a large production per man engaged in the work, while in more intensive 

 agriculture in the more settled countries a lower production per man is 

 obtained, although the production per acre may be more than double. 

 The urgent practical problem is to increase production per man while at 

 the same time maintaining or increasing production per acre. All this 

 implies technical skill of no mean order on the part not only of the manager 

 but also of the manual worker, and to my mind it requires something 

 more, something which makes the acquiring of technical skill a compara- 

 tively easy matter, and that something consists in a good general and 

 continued cultural education. There is no doubt, I think, that educa- 

 tion, cultural education apart from vocational training, is held in greater 

 respect in all those parts of the British Isles which are not English. It 

 is certainly true of Ireland and of Scotland, and, I understand, of Wales. 



* Scottish Journal of Agriculture, vol. x, p. 28. 



* ' The Transition of Agriculture,' Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, May 20, 1927. 



