220 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
preferential treatment superseded Jaissex faire. We see agriculturists 
throughout the world, white, yellow, brown, black, faced with the twin 
problems of apparent overproduction and under consumption. If 
analysed, however, the former generally appears to be due, in the main, 
not to technical improvements such as mechanisation, combined with 
higher rates of yield, but to State maintenance of artificially augmented 
crop areas by means of devices, often meretricious in character, designed to 
bolster up sub-marginal producers or those attracted to the industry by 
the lure of war-time price levels. Equally, we observe many secondary 
industries in this and other countries struggling against reduced prices 
and augmented costs of production. Everywhere we see nationalism, 
elevated upon a pedestal, temporarily defying, with the aid of every device 
known to the wit of man, economic and financial vicissitudes, which in 
turn clog the transference of men, money, commodities and services. 
We see European states fostering their peasantry by every artifice in order 
to secure agrarian tranquillity, and we see, simultaneously, the United 
States of America pouring out thousands of millions of dollars to improve 
the prospects of her more extensively engaged producers. Everywhere 
the cry is ‘More land for the people!’ and ‘ More people for the 
land !’ 
Have we in this country not done wisely to pursue, during the latest 
of three onslaughts, a middle course (in relation to the above examples) 
on the one hand, not extravagant in money, nor, on the other, by persuad- 
ing an undue proportion of our population to live on, or by, the land, 
subversive of ethical standards ? Even such a policy as ours represents, 
however, a complete break with tradition and with outlook in regard to 
social as well as to economic matters, and it has been accomplished at first 
by comparatively heavy financial commitments, in turn to be succeeded 
by the adoption of a ‘ planned economy ’ that has called for readjustment 
in the respective interests of consumers, distributors, overseas producers, 
and even of other industries, some of which latter are themselves un- 
sheltered from the blasts of world competition. This ‘ emergency ’ 
programme, as it was first termed, has been carried through at the cost of 
a reduction in the initiative and freedom of producers, by a certain trans- 
ference from ‘ dirty boot ’ farming to the filling of forms, by a progressive 
dependence upon outside authority, and, psychologically, by the growth 
of what may tend to become a defeatist attitude. Yet, the appeal non 
tali auxilio has yet to issue in any volume from the lips of rural spokesmen. 
Up to the change of policy in 1932, the direct cost—even if we include 
those long-term commitments—had, by post-war standards, not been 
excessive, but the nation, or, rather, the urban population, has now 
acquiesced in a policy which more and more affects not merely the pro- 
ducer and the tax-payer but every householder in the land, so that, 
latterly, a price raising objective has had to sustain criticism and inquiry 
from a far wider field. 
I have refrained from discussing certain factors axiomatic to the new 
system, such as its effects upon our secondary industries hitherto engaged 
in exchanging their products for imported foodstuffs ; the future trade 
and financial relationships likely to subsist between ourselves, our own 
