20 
LAND & WATER 
August 2, 1917 
of the men who joined the ranks will never return. More- 
over, there will be some difficulty in retaining the existing 
supply of labour unless good wages can be secured- -2ss. a 
week will not suffice in miny districts — ^and it is certain tliat 
a proiJer wage cannot 
be paid if milk is to te 
sold at less than six- 
pence per quart. 
Realising these facts 
many have swallowed 
their prejudices, are 
emploj'ing power to 
do the milking, and 
many more are likely 
to do so in the near 
future. There is, how- 
ever, one factor which 
v\ ill prevent milking 
machines becoming 
quite general. They 
cannot be used eco- 
nomically in dairies 
below a certain size, 
and a very large pro- 
portion of the milk 
supply is provided by 
small farmers and 
small holders. It looks 
iis if the small pro- 
ducer must be under- 
sold, and so crowded 
out, except where cer- 
tain local conditions 
favour his existence. 
The prejudice of the 
dairy farmer in this 
ca.si! has not been 
without some reason, for until comparatively recently 
the machines offered for sale were not without their disad- 
vantages. Necessity, however, has spurred the manufacturer 
as well as the user, and various improvements have been 
ef ected. 
Numerous developments of lesser degree may be noted in 
Women Workers on 
the shape of an increased demand for hay-loaders, hay- 
making implements, and in fact for every kind of labour- 
saving machinery. Perliaps no new devices of outstanding 
importance (with one exception) may be recorded, but a mucli 
wider use of these 
previously found only 
in the hands of the 
most ad\ anced men 
is undoubted. For 
instance, it is prob- 
able that in no single 
year will there have 
been so muchspraving 
of potatoes in order 
to prevent disease. 
The exception referred 
to is a new ly paten 
ted farmyard manure 
spreader, which 1 am 
told is a great im- 
provement on all 
previous attempts in 
this direction, and 
which does the work, 
not only quicker, but 
gives a much more 
even distribution than 
hand work. 
Although on nati- 
onal grounds it was 
doubtless necessary to 
cancel the meeting of 
the Royal Agricultural 
Society of England's 
show in 1917. its sus- 
pension will' certainly 
have helped to retard- 
mvention, and even more to check the demand for the most 
recent improvements. This annual exhibition is a better method 
of bnngmg home to the minds of many thousands of people 
what the agricultural industry means to the country and of 
demonstrating to producers the latest developments in imple- 
ments and maclunery than any other way that is practicable 
By courtesy of " 
the Land A.D. £C0 
Modein Fanning ' 
Industrial Developments : A Retrospect 
By Jason 
DU .RING the great war with France a century ago, 
nine men out of ten were engaged in the tasks of 
peace. If war had absorbed the energies of the 
whole people then as it does now, it w ould have been 
impossible for any nation to maintain the struggle from 1793 
to 1815 with one brief break. As our population was under 
ten millions, about half that of France, it is clear that our 
man-power would have given out long before the peace of 
Amiens. But the great mass of the population during those 
years were engaged not in learning to be soldiers, nor even in 
providing munitions of war, but in building up our new in- 
dustries. We were often in great straits," and after 1803, 
the rapid depreciation of paper money led to crisis and 
disaster. But the most striking fact about the war, is the 
concentration of our national energy on the production of 
cotton, wool and iron, and it was during these vears that 
the foundations of our industrial supremacy w ere laid. 
When the skies fell, in August 1914, many people not 
unnaturally imagined that the effect of war would be to 
disorganise industry and throw millions of people out of em- 
ployment. Our industrial and commercial life depended 
on a great system of international commerce and credit, 
and so violent a disturbance as a great war involving most 
of Europe would clearly bring that system to ruin. We 
pictured what happened to our industry during the conflict 
between Napoleon's Berlin Decrees and our Orders in Council. 
It was the first time that our workpeople had felt the effect 
of the new commercial system, and at one moment thirty 
mills were silent in Manchester alone. At that time England 
and France tried to starve each other out and we had a fore- 
taste of the methods to be used a century later. France was 
reduced to a search for substitutes which reminds us of our 
own devices to-day. " Premiums were offered at Vienna 
for subtitutes for camphor, peruvian bark, and opium; 
jnd for the discovery of plants having the same virtues as 
senna, jalap and ipecacuanha. Many towns went unlit for 
want of oil. Peas, beans and lupins were dried for coffee ; 
the leaves of the hornbeam were dried for tea and scented 
with the roots of the iris. Tea was planted in Corsica, which 
was nearly in the same latitude as China, and the 
results were announced to be a complete success. Experi- 
nients were made in extracting sugar from raisins, from 
chestnuts, from honey, even from seaweed." 
England had learnt then what a price her population had 
to pay for the creation of world markets. To-day that price 
would be heavier, because the new system of Capitalist 
industry, international credit, and world-wide exchange was 
far more highly developed. If we turn to the earlv days of 
the war, we see that anxious minds thought chiefly about 
the most effective way of treating unemployment. " 
It would have been difficult for anybody at that time to 
imagine the spectacle Great Britain was to present one year 
two years later. Nobody could have foreseen the insatiable 
effects of modern war. It had not occurred to the most op- 
timistic mind that unemployment would be unknown in a 
great w-ar : it had not occurred to the most pessimistic 
mind that everybody, men and women supposed to be too 
old, boys and girls known to be too young, would be needed 
to turn out the instruments of destruction. The strain of 
such a war is almost overwhelming. We have had to find 
an army of five millions : to supply that army and not that 
army alone with munitions on a scale nobody had dreamt 
of : to produce for peaceful commerce enough to maintain 
our exchanges : to build ships to supply the wastage due to 
methods of war that before were almost unthinkable ■ 
to cultivate our own fields, knowing that every blade of corn 
mattered as it would matter to a city besieged. The whole 
nation IS then on war work of one kind or another 
1 a, transformation is a tremendous piece of national 
work, and the fact that it has been possible shows what a 
reserve of power and resourcefulness the nation possesses 
rhe mam credit for it must go, not to this or that authority but 
o the ordinary citizen. If it ],ad not been for his patience 
his courage, his patriotism, this vast achievement wx.uld not 
have been possible. We are very apt in writing and reading 
history to looK out for great names and leaders, and to for 
get that a nation s victories are not won by its generals alone 
We have been lavish enoughof titles and honours to generals' 
