June 6, 19 1 8 Land & Water 
Village of the Future : By Jason 
13 
A FEW years ago a traveller found himself at 
Gubbio, the httle hill-town in Umbria, at the 
time of the Festa dei Ceri. The dav of the 
festival was, unhappily, very wet ; but that did 
not prevent the peasants from flocking into the 
town to see the guildsmen carry the^ strange images about 
which learned antiquarians still .dispute, to hear the bishop 
bless the ceremony, and to watch the delight and excitement 
with which the people of Gubbio remind themselves year 
after year of their ancient traditions. Next day the sun 
came out again, and the beautiful town in its beautiful 
setting of hills was looking at its best as the traveller waited 
at the station for the leisurely train. A few peasants grouped 
themselves round him, and he began to talk with them 
about the ceremony and about the glories of their country- 
side. "Yes," they agreed it was all very beautiful; but 
yet, they added with wistful and longing faces, what would 
they not give for a few factories with their promise of 
•emploj'ment and 
wealth for the 
impoverished dis- 
trict ? And the 
traveller, thinking 
of Oldham and 
Burnley and Shef- 
field , went away 
sad at heart, re- 
flecting on the 
cruel fate which 
made Gubbio a 
pleasure and solace 
to the EngUshman 
whose country was 
the home of the 
Industrial Revo- 
lution, and con- 
demned the people 
of Gubbio to envy 
Lancashire her 
smoke and her 
disfigured skies. 
The English vil- 
lage and English 
village life' have occupied in the imagination of a good many 
people very much the same position as Italy has occupied in 
the imagination of the traveller. This is not surprising in itself. 
^f the American who explores Europe finds a strange content- 
ment in visiting on his return a few characteristic villages in the 
south of England, it is not merely because he sees before him the 
most beautiful villages in the world. The landscape speaks 
to him of stability, of peace, of a world that stands still in 
the midst of change, of a power that seems to defy all the 
raw and blatant strength of industrial cities. And for many 
people the village is primarily a place' to be visited, and men 
and women dream about country life in the spirit of the 
age that adored Fragonard and Watteau. 
When they hear of the flight from the country to the towns 
they recall the famous rhapsody in the Geoi^cs : 
* At secura quies et nescia fallere vita 
Dives opum variarum, at latis otia fundis, 
Speluncae, vivique lacus, at frigida Tempe, 
Mug^tusque bourn, moUesque sub arbore somni. 
For those to whom a village is not a pleasant feature of a 
motor-car expedition or an agreeable place for the week-end, 
village life presents -rather a different aspect. It is a stern 
struggle. If the labourer wanted to quote a Latin poet he 
would recall the moving description of Lucretius : 
t Jamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator 
Crebrius incassum manuum cecidisse labores, 
or the warning in the*Georgics that the Pater ipse colendi 
has sentenced the husbandman to a life of hard and incessant 
labour. 
And his life, apart from his work, is l>are and monotonous 
compared with the life of the town.. There have been con- 
troversies enough over the relative attractions of town and 
country life, but it remains true that the modern villager 
feels as Horace's bailiff felt about the lack of amusement 
and incident in the village. In the town there are th(^atre.-, 
auici and life ignorant of disappoinlnient, wealtliy in manifold riclics. the 
lands, caverns and living laket, cool pleasancas and the lowing of o«en, 
A Typical Midland Village 
• Careless 
p«ane of broad lands, caverns and living 
and soft slumbers beneath the trees. 
1 And now the aged peasant, 
hands has come to nautili. 
sbakinf( bis head, often lamiMils that the labour of his 
music-halls, cinemas, clubs ; the streets are lighted, men and 
women meet and talk ' and read the paper, and there is a 
sense of life and excitement in the atmosphere. 
Turn to the village, and what do we see ? There is hardly 
ever a club or institute. The public-house provides little 
accommodation, aild none of the games and recreation that 
young men need. The place is dark ; the cottages are small, 
and the opportunities for the meetings of friends are rare 
and difficult. It is common to see the young men collect 
round the station for the sake of the light and the occasional 
excitement of a train. In many villages one public-house 
is the resort of the farmers, the other of the older labourers, 
and the younger labourers have to find what opportunities 
they can outside. 
Now, the villager needs all these things not less but more 
than the townsman. He spends long hours in soUtary labour. 
Watch a man ploughing the livelong day. He is driving a 
Straight line which is an art, and therefore an occupation to 
the intelligence. 
He is watching his 
horses, of whom he 
is often very fond 
and careful. He is 
in the open air, 
keeping an eye on 
the changing signs 
of the sky. He 
has before him, it 
may be, a power- 
ful and beautiful 
landscape. All 
this is true, but let 
the reader settle 
down day after 
day to dig a potato 
field, which is just 
as diflicult and 
absorbing a task to 
a novice, in one of 
the most enchant- 
ing valleys of the 
world, and he will 
• ' , soon find that his 
mind is roaming over a thousand fancies, memories of his 
travels, memories of books he has read, of fine passages that 
haunt the memory, of pictures or buildings or music, or plays ; 
they are the stimulants that keep him from tedium, the friends 
of iiis solitary hours. For as soon as an operation becomes 
a routine operation a man does" it largely by instinct, and his. 
mind is set free from the task before him. 1 
What a difference it makes to a man whether he has these 
resources of companionship or whether the thoughts that 
cross and recross his wearied mind are limited to the life 
of a few cottages. If you "want to make a man's work unin- 
teresting, make his leisure uninteresting. That would have 
seemed a paradox to our great-grandfathers who thought a 
man worked all the better if he had nothing to interest him 
when he was not working. But it is the tnith. When 
every village has its cinema, agriculture will be infinitely 
more prosperous, for men will gladly give it their best energies. 
Before the war it was commonly recognised that the 
improvement of village life — or perhaps it would be truer to 
s^peak of it as the restoration of village life — was urgently 
necessary. To-day that convictioiv is universal. Nobody is 
going to ask \he soldier to return to a state of things in which 
social life can scarcely be said to exist. He has known the 
spell of comradeship ; he has lived • in a world which has 
learnt how to organise conceits and cinemas under the most 
difficult and distracting conditions • he has talked and lived 
with men drawn frtjm all parts of the world with every kind 
of past and every \'aricty of experience. Leisure has an 
infinitely greater rignificancc in his eyes than ever before. 
The restoration of village life must be treated as a serious 
and definite object of public policy. As it happens, we have 
at this moment a remarkable opportunity. We find our- 
selves hi a position in which we can escape from the dilemma 
suggested by the pensive regrets of the Gubbio peasant. 
The re\-oluti(>n associated with the discovery of the uses of 
steam ruined our towns. The revolution that will be asso- 
ciated with the discovery of the uses of electricity will save 
our villages. Only, of course, we must have very clear ideas 
of what we want ; we must think clearly, arid act cour- 
ageously. Roughly -ip'-aking, we may say of the Industrial 
