August 29, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
I 
17 
The New Village: By Jason 
IN his famous invocation in the Georgics, Virgil speaks 
of Italy as the mother of fruits and the mother of men. 
When our ancestors gave the rein to the enclosure 
movement in the eighteenth century they ceased to 
think of England as the mother of men and thought 
only of the maximum production of which the land was 
capable. As it happened, and as it often happens when men 
accept the standards of the moment without criticism, the 
methods that destroyed the old village as a living c(«nmunity 
were not in the long run the most favourable to production. 
But the consequences of that mistake lasted through the 
nineteenth century, and the modern English village is the 
result. 
Most people probably know of villages where the people 
of the place have no proper supply of water or milk, not to 
speak of decent cottages and gardens. Under the old 
agriculture there was not this unequal distribution of the 
necessaries of life because as contemporary writers pointed 
out labourers kept cows and pigs, and produced a certain 
amount of food for themselves. On the face of it, there is 
something anomalous in a solution which condemns the pro- 
ducers of food to have less than their share of the food they 
produce. 
The war has shaken the nation out of this dangerous 
apathy, for it has given a new value ta human lif 3. 
We can get some irrlpression of the change of temper 
produced by the war from the report just published by the 
Ministry of Reconstruction of the Agricultural Pohcy Sub- 
committee. For this Report recommends among other 
things a drastic and revolutionary reorganisation of the 
village. 
The Report prof)Oses that any Parish Counci' should have 
power to call for an inquiry, and that the Board of Agri- 
culture, in such application, should appoint a valuer to 
make a thorough report on the parish, showing how it 
might be improved on business lines in respect of small 
•occupying ownerships, gardens, allotments, small holdings, 
cottages, cow commons, horse commons, and recreation 
grounds. A local inquiry would then be held and an 
inspector would draw up a scheme for the Board of Agri- 
culture. The Agricultural Committee of the county would 
be responsible for carrying out the scheme, and the Parish 
Council for its subsequent administration, ; subject to the 
supervision of the Committee. An alternative plan would 
be to allow the creation of a Public Utility Society to carry 
out the scheme. 
Whether this is in detail the best way of setting about the 
reorganisation of the village is a matter for discussion. It has 
been suggested in these pages that the War Agricultural , 
Committees, reconstituted on a broader basis, will bQ most 
useful bodies for stimulating and guiding village development, 
but it is, of course, essential that they should be representa- 
tive of village society and not merely of the farmers. The 
various Unions that include agricultural labourers, such as 
the Workers' Union and the Agricultural Labourers' Union, 
must take part in these Committees, and ' room must 
be found for representatives Of the local authorities. Clearly 
what is wanted is a To\yn-plannirig Scheme for rural districts, 
conceived in a large spirit by men of imagination who under- 
stand what are the needs of a democratic society. 
Soldiers and Land Settlement 
We may expect that under some such scheme as this 
opportunities will be found for the development of agriculture 
on the lines that will give an opening to the returning soldier. 
Mr. Prothero had to" make the shameful confession in the 
House of Commons the other day that five soldiers had been 
settled on the land. . The scheme adopted by the Board of 
Agriculture is, of course, ludicrously inadequate, and no 
scheme will serve short of the drastic reorganisation of rural 
life. For this purpose the development of electric power 
will be of the greatest importance. 
The use of electricity in agriculture is only just beginning ; 
in some applications it is still in the experimental stage. But 
its value for all the routine operations of agriculture is un- 
questionable. A most instructive chapter on this subject 
is printed in the " Proceedings of the Incorporated Municipal 
Electrical Association," in 19.16. It contains a paper read 
by Mr. Kerr, the engineer to the City of Hereford, who set 
to work some years ago to bring cheap power within 
reach of the farmer, and the report of the discussion that 
followed. 
A leading Herefordshire farmer^ Councillor Langford, gave 
a description of the help electric power had given him. "He 
was driving a milking machine for milking about seventy 
or eighty cows, and also a chaff cutter which, in addition to 
cutting the food for his milking cows in winter, was also 
cutting the chaff for 150 bullocks and a flock of about 600 
sheep. He also pulped the mangolds and swedes and crushed 
the cakes and corn for feeding the animals, and lastly, he 
put in a small motor for the purpose of pumping water from 
a deep well, while during the season that had just passed Mr. 
Kew had adapted for him some sheep-shearing apparatus 
in conjunction with a portable motor. In addition, he was 
lighting the whole of the farm buildings and also a yard known 
as ' The Fold ' outside the farm buildings by electricity. He 
was also crusliing apples and pressing the juice from them 
for making cider. Before he adopted electricity for filtering, 
he used to have to draw the cider from various long distances 
in the cellars in the yard to the fixed engine before it could 
be put through the filter. Now, however, he was able to 
take the portable pump and motor wherever he required it 
for filtering the cider. When once you have an installation 
on your farm, you can do almost any work with it anywhere 
by means of a portable motor and cable." Mr. Langford 
looks forward to the use of electricity for ploughing, reaping, 
bringing home the corn, and getting water from the brook 
in dry weather to irrigate the land. 
Electric or Steam Power 
This new power will serve the small-holder, or the colony 
of soldier settlers, or the community of co-operative peasants 
as readily as it serves the large farmer and the large landowner. 
The use of machinery seems in some circumstances to give 
an overwhelming advantage to the large business. If you 
have to get up steam for your machinery it is a very expensive 
matter to use the machinery for small operations, or for a 
comparatively short time. But if your machinery is worked 
by electricity there is no waste for it is worked by a 
povver of which you use just as much as you want for a 
particular operation. The same machine requires greater 
power to drive it for one purpose than for another, and it is, 
therefore, an immense boon to be able to adapt your consump- 
tion exactly to your needs. 
If, therefore, we are setting out to give the returned soldier 
a career on the land, by introducing small-holdings, larger 
farms co-operatively managed, settlements, and in general 
such a variety of opportunities as are needed to re-establish 
a free and happy society on the soil, we shall be able to give 
t5 him the industrial power which has hitherto been the 
luxury of the large organisations. This applies to the opera- 
tions on his farm. It applies also to the transport and market- 
ing of his products. For one of the features of any recon- 
struction scheme will be a system of railless traction in the 
village so that peasants and farmers of all kinds— and not 
peasants and farmers only — can send and receive without 
all the trouble and expense of transport in the country at 
present. The organisation of co-operative buying and selling 
will be a simple problem under these conditions. 
But thig programme depends on our taking the right course 
in the development of our electrical power. The whole 
question has been considered by a Committee set up by the 
Board of Trade and the report of this Committee has just 
been published. It is an important and' interesting document 
recommending the estabUshment of Electricity Commissions 
with district Boards, but it contains a few disquieting passages. 
Thus, in one part of the Report it is suggested that provision 
must first be made for the great industrial districts. " It 
will not be necessary in the first instance," the Report pro- 
ceeds, " to delimit districts in portions of the country where no 
important electrical development can immediately be antici- 
pated." This language gives the impression thafthe country 
is going to have to wait. But why should the country wait ? 
Is there any reason why the prosecution of a national policy 
of electrical development should not be undertaken on the 
same lines as the Post Office ? We have discovered a new 
power ; we have discovered that under proper conditions this 
power can be produced cheaply ; we realise that the use of this 
power may make all the difference between success and 
failure, not in one industry, but in all our industrial life. 
Why should we refuse this power to any of our industries i 
and why above all to agriculture, which is recognised as second 
to none in importance and would moreover be benefited 
particularly by the fertilisers that are extracted from coal 
at a generating station ? 
