228 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
present crisis in world agriculture. Indeed, the immediate cause is the 
fall in the general price level following the contraction of currency. But 
a tremendous fall in prices, due to the same cause, occurred at the end 
of the Napoleonic wars without causing the general ruination of agri- 
culturists. The severity of the present crisis has been due, as I see 
the matter, to the preceding long period of inadequate returns in agri- 
culture, which left the industry with depleted capital and a burden of 
debt, and therefore unfit to withstand a period of general economic 
disorganisation. If the significance of rapid agricultural progress had 
been realised in time, and if nations had been prepared to accept its logical 
consequences, there might have been no necessity to-day to devise any 
revolutionary economic plan for the industry. For instance, it might 
have been foreseen that the cheap producer in the new countries must 
displace the dear producer in the old, and that as Canadian prairie was 
broken up, Midland clays must go down to grass. But no country was 
prepared to accept either a decline in the number of its agriculturists 
or a reduction of its home output of food. Rural depopulation was 
viewed with widespread alarm, and the extensification of farming was 
regarded as an evil implying almost moral turpitude on the part of the 
farmer. Again it might have been seen that, the world’s requirements 
of bread being amply met, some of the surplus energies of farmers might 
have been diverted to the production of more interesting commodities 
like fruit or chickens or tobacco. But States, when they intervened at 
all, did so in the opposite sense—encouraging the production of the 
old necessaries and discouraging the expansion of consumption of 
luxuries. Such ideas die hard. It is still considered a meritorious thing 
to employ an agricultural labourer, but there is no particular feeling 
about the employment of barbers, haberdashers or electricians. It is 
somehow more honourable to plough a field than to let it lie in grass. 
It is a nobler thing to grow wheat (even if nobody wants to eat it) than 
peaches or strawberries. These notions are a legacy from the time 
when the world was hungry of necessity, and when people lived healthily 
in the country but died quickly in the towns. We must realise that 
these conditions have ceased to be. There is a superabundant organ- 
isation for food production, and there is no difficulty about breeding 
up a good and healthy human stock in the modern city. It seems to 
me that there is no argument for keeping unnecessary workers in agri- 
culture or for driving people back to the land. 
During the past few years there has been a rapidly growing realisation, 
in one country after another, that the farmer’s economic lot was becoming 
unendurable, and a mass of different expedients have been devised, 
either by governments themselves or with their sanction and approval, 
to ensure something like a fair price for agricultural commodities. These 
measures are based on a wide variety of principles, and some are open to 
obvious criticism. For example, we have compulsory restriction of 
output; monetary compensations by the State for restrictions voluntarily 
made; even plans for the destruction of produce which is judged to 
be in excess of demand. We have direct State subsidies designed to 
make good the difference between cost of production and market price 
