443 CONFERENCE OF DELEGATES 



of their permanent ways and depots these agencies manifested as little 

 regard for rural amenities as had been shown by the producer of minerals 

 or the manufacturer of goods. All that prevented these new ' common 

 carriers ' from obtaining control of the destinies of the producers, the 

 manufacturers, and the consumers they exist to serve was their devotion to 

 the doctrine that ' competition is the life of trade.' It is, however, fair to 

 say that these common carriers did nothing overt to impair the harmony of 

 rural and urban interests induced by the Industrial Revolution, until the 

 use of steam was extended to seaborne traffic and supplies of food raised 

 overseas under extensive methods of cultivation could be offered to dwellers 

 in English manufacturing towns at prices with which supplies raised inten- 

 sively in England could not well compete. The result has been that agri- 

 culture, the industry which, so far as the world at large is concerned, is 

 more important than all other industries combined — it supplies the food 

 required by the workers' of all other industries as well as of its own — has, so 

 far as this country is concerned, ceased to be an economic occupation. The 

 adoption by English industrial interests of the attitude towards English 

 agricultural interests, that mankind generally adopts towards whatever it 

 has injured, is therefore only natural. 



The most outstanding statistical consequence of the Industrial Revolution 

 in this country has been that with us the urban population now out-numbers 

 the rural population. The most important political effect of this statistical 

 fact has been that we now enjoy a franchise which makes it expedient for 

 our legislators so to regulate taxation as to lose fewest votes. To meet this 

 requirement as far as possible, they have adopted the expedient of taxing 

 the dead. This method, like various other human devices, betrays the 

 defects of its merits. What may, when applied to the recompense of 

 industry, be a justifiable confiscation of the earnings of an individual and 

 serve as a salutary discouragement to the unsocial crime of thrift, has, when 

 applied to the resources of rural economy, effects indistinguishable from 

 those of a levy on capital. The practical effect of this legislative discrimina- 

 tion, applied under the pretext of uniformity, in the treatment of rural as 

 contrasted with urban interests, which directly concerns local societies, is 

 the sure and by no means slow elimination of what has, ever since the 

 Industrial Revolution began, been the greatest safeguard of our amenities 

 and especially of the flora and the fauna of the countryside. 



The appeal of our Organising Committee to the delegates of the corre- 

 sponding societies now present in conference is, therefore, in essence, the 

 expression of a hope that henceforth local societies may be prepared to 

 undertake, on behalf of their own areas, a duty that has hitherto been 

 carried out by that type of rural economy which our urban electorate has 

 succeeded in paralysing and is determined to destroy. That the assistance 

 of local societies will be welcomed by what stillremains of the expiring agency 

 we are assured. Unfortunately this very fact warns us that the opposition 

 local societies are certain to meet from urban dwellers taught to regard 

 rural amenities as relics of savagery and to consider rows of bungalows as 

 signs of civilisation, will be the more implacable. 



There are other difficulties which deserve the attention of local societies. 

 The ' common carriers ' authorised to form and maintain roads of their own 

 on which they may use for haulage either coal or current, have now to face 

 the active competition of opponents able to use petrol engines on the old 

 public highways, provided these be supplied with a new and smoother 

 surface at the expense of the community. This favoured agency now enables 

 urban residents, who wish to do this, to visit ' places of historic interest or 

 natural beauty ' with an ease and comfort which the lay-out of railway 



