H 
Land & Water 
The Land — II 
July II, 191 8 
GREAT BRITAIN has become an industrial 
country. There is barely a tenth of its popula- 
tion living under strictly agricultural conditions, 
principally concerned with agricultural work, and 
thinking in terms of the open fields. 
That seems to be an exaggerated statement until one 
has looked into the reahties of life in so-called agricultural 
districts. If we take the statistics of residence we shall 
find a much larger proportion than a tenth to be living 
under conditions called " rural." The worst way of gathering 
such statistics is the official way of distinguishing between 
urban and non-urban areas. That, of course, is futile, for 
the boundaries are purely arbitrary. But even if we go 
carefully over the map of some countiyside we know, and 
mark off on it districts to which we are personal witnesses, 
and which we' know have nothing of the town about them, 
yet we shall soon find how large a proportion of those inhabit- 
ing these districts have no knowledge of general agriculture, 
and hardly come across it at all. You cannot count as part 
of the truly agricultural population — part, that is, of the 
population which understands the culture of the open field — 
anyone who is not engaged in work or in supervision there- 
upon. That strictly agricultural population is a bare tenth 
of our total to-day. PZvery one knows vaguely that a great 
revolution has taken place in the occupation of Englishmen, 
even within living memory. Very few people know its 
magnitude, and still fewer people know its quality. It is 
not only that the actual number of people working upon the 
fields has grown to be so small a proportion ; it is much 
more that the tone of mind throughout the whole community 
has changed through the change in proportion between those 
whose habits and whose outlook are urban and those who' 
are still typically of the village. 
Now, that being so, we have for the prime political condi- 
tion which runs through our discussions upon rnpdern English 
agriculture, the simple fact that nearly all thpse who discuss 
ft know nothing about it .; and in their ignorance the point 
on which they show most ignorance is the necessary com- 
plexity of agricultural work. The point on which they 
show next most ignorance is the dehcacy of its adjustment, 
and the third point on which they show ignorance — appalling, 
indeed, but a httle less than on the other two— is the length 
of time over which any judgment of agricultural failure or 
success must be extended. Ignorance upon the first point 
is the most fatal of all : The ignorance which assimilates 
agricultural work to factory work, or office work of any 
kind, §nd blunderingly attempts to simplify and to stan- 
dardise it all. Ignorance upon the second point leads to 
oppressive — and often disastrous— systems of taxation ; 
ignorance upon the third point leads to a complete mis- 
judgment of "the economic curve" — that is, the tendency 
present in any department of agricultural activity. For in- 
stance, if you do not know that newly ploughed pasture suffers 
from wireworm, and that the second— not the first — year is the 
test of success, you will quite misjudge the value of what was 
done in the breaking-up of pasture last' autumn and winter.' 
As to the first of these peculiar characters of agriculture 
which differentiate it from modern industrial life, nothing 
but experience can teach it to a man. But a short example 
may suggest it : Go into any one of the sheds where they 
are now making shell, and observe the processes at work. 
You will see a certain number of men and women turning 
the shell on lathes. Hour after hour and day after day 
the same work of a perfectly simple nature is performed by 
the same individual. One even asks oneself, sometimes, 
whether machinery cannot be got to do more than it does, 
and whether the man or ^woman watching the machine is 
always necessary. Your factory will work perfectly well 
with the man or woman who can just watch and manage 
the lathe completely ignorant of other processes, such as 
the shrinking on of the bands or the filling of shell. They 
need never have seen shrapnel cast or cut from its strip or 
poured into the case. Therq is complexity here of a sort ; 
all these processes have to be co-ordinated, and a certaun 
small number of men have to do the staff work. But one 
lathe is like another and one piece of metal like another, 
and the so-called "skilled workers" are workers with no 
general skill, but skilled only at the repetition of one dull 
task over and over again. , As with shell, so with cotton. 
.A.s with cotton, so with mining. As with mimng, so with 
the building of iron ships. That is the very soul of modern 
industrialism. The individual is specialised, and the thing 
on which he is specialised is a thing of routine inhumanly 
simple. Machinery, which is its basis, affects the whole 
character of industrial life from top to bottom. The whole 
thing is a machine. You can calculate the nun.ber of hours 
in which a man gives his best result ; you can presuj^pose 
him doing the same work so many hours a week for so many 
weeks in the year, year after year. Every item of your 
costings can be put in the form of an abstraction : an exact 
number. Each part of your produce is like ten thousand 
similar parts which can all be produced in the same fashion 
and at the same exactly calculable expense in energy. 
With agriculture, all these ^commonplaces of industry 
— which the industrial worker or capitalist has come to 
regard as part of the nature of things — disappear. There is 
the infinite variety of soil ; the variety of weather ; .those^ 
subtle varieties of chmate the effects of which only long' 
experience can determine. On the top of all this variety 
there is a necessary wide variety of knowledge in the worker. 
No matter how large your agricultural uait ; no matter 
.how thoroughly you organise your workers upon it ; though 
you had 100,000 acres to develop and 10,000 slaves to order 
at will, you would never arrive at industrial standa'rds. • You 
could never differentiate your labour into ploughing, sowing,, 
manuring, weeding, harvesting, hay-making, and the rest. 
You would always have to trust for your results to human 
.agents who were each of them experts in many processes. 
It is true that even on a comparatively small farm you car* 
differentiate labour somewhat. You will have men who cart 
look after stock and other men who cannot look after stock, 
etc. But there is necessarily a vast amount of overlap. 
Your agricultural worker is necessarily a man of complex 
expert knowledge, which has to be apphed to different pro- 
cesses in your production. There is no space here to discuss 
the effect of this on character, though it is the most fruitful 
of political themes. We are dealing only with qertain econo- 
mic necessities. Agriculture is of its nature a thing highly 
complex, demanding complexity of experience and diverse 
expert power in all those who conduct it, not only in gome 
small directing staff. This is the first great characteristic 
which cuts it off from the type of mind and calculation pro- 
duced under industrial conditions. 
Take a farm, however large and however similar in soil 
throughout : Try to run it as you would run a factory, witli 
exact time-tables, fines fOr those who come late, complete 
division of labour, standardisation of method, and all the 
rest of it, and you will be ruined. One might express the 
thing roughly by saying that agriculture is an art. The 
absence of art is the chief d,efect of industrial civihsation. 
and the industrial mind tr3'ing to deal with an art breaks 
down frequently. 
Here is another way of putting it : The English village is 
an organism highly characterised. It must be dealt with 
as such. Anj'one who has direct dealings with field labour 
as distinguished from intensive cultivation ; anyone who- 
has to deal daily and familiarly with 1 the agricultural 
labourer, the ploughman, the shepherd, the stockman, 
however unfamiliar he may have been with the moral 
problem of organising labour upon the land, and however 
much he may have been trained in the much simpler pro- 
cesses of industry, comes to recognise this truth. The 
English village still has a peasantry, although that peasantry 
has been largely dispossessed in the course of centuries from 
its former direct holding of the .'ioil. The traditions of 
the village and the type of character produced by it are still 
that tenacious complex organic thing which we call a 
peasantry. You cannot re-arrange the part of a living 
organism at will as you can those of a machine; if you 
try to do so, you kill it. 
Here, therefore, is the first great danger due to the general 
ignorance of agricultural affairs : The danger that during 
the period of "reconstruction," as it is called, politicians 
and public servants will gravely damage agriculture by 
attempting to apply to it the urban doctrine of "efficiency." 
From that, as we shall see in a later article, strong local 
committees will save us when the necessary action of the 
State appears in agriculture after the war. 
There remain the two other forms of ignorance : Ignorance 
upon the dehcacy of adjustment in agricultural affairs and 
an ignorance of the length of time — at least three years 
even in the simplest problems-^over which observation must 
extend before the results of agricultural work are known. 
Both these forms of ignorance might prove disastrous in the 
period of reconstruction, and we shall see next week how 
th^ danger threatens. Agricola. 
