/

*

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES

GIFT OF CAPT. AND MRS.
PAUL MCBRIDE PERIGORD

LACKWELL Ltd
Booksellers.

UNIVERSITY of CAL1F0KWL*

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LOS ANGELES

LIBRARY

XEbe TRew iBva Series

(VOLUME NINE)

A NEW
AGRICULTURAL POLICY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH AGRI-
CULTURAL LABOURER, 1870-1920.

THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND.

FIRST ADVICE TO WOULD - BE
FARMERS.

THE TYRANNY OF THE COUNTRY-
SIDE.

THE SURREY HILLS.
Illustrated by Elliott Seabrooke.

A NEW
AGRICULTURAL POLICY

BY

F. E. GREEN

■

LONDON
LEONARD PARSONS

DEVONSHIRE STREET

* ri

OOih

I

First Published March 1921

■ . • ■ •

• • • . ■ .

. ■•.... ,-

• .«.•«■■ •,

Leonard Parsons Ltd.

ms

The Author wishes to express his indebtedness to
Mr. J. Chuter Ede, J.P., C.C., and to Mrs. Ede for the
pains they have taken and the interest they have
shown in reading the manuscript of this book.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Failure of Private Enterprise . 9

II. How County Executive Committees tried

to save the Situation . .22

III. Noblesse Oblige . . . 43

IV. The Policy of Guaranteed Prices . 64

V. The Agriculture Act and its Futilities 80

VI. How Agricultural Committees should be

formed . . . . .96

VII. A National Council of Agriculture . 119

VIII. Small Holdings or Large Farms? . 128

T-S

IX. Farming by Collective Effort . . 144

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A NEW
AGRICULTURAL POLICY

CHAPTER I
THE FAILURE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

THE difference between conducting an
industry under the shelter of a roof —
where every worker, every particle of
machinery or material can be supervised — and
one in which work is very often carried on by
isolated manual and horse labour, and which is
always subject to the climatic changes of burn-
ing suns, of fierce gales and floods, of frost and
snow, is, I think, obvious.

The divergence between the factory and the
farm is even more extended. The factory
owner has almost absolute control, subject to
laws which his competitors have also to obey,
over the conditions obtaining inside his factory,
and the inefficiency of his competitor next door
is a matter for rejoicing rather than for com-
plaint. Not so on the farm, where the forces
of Nature should induce all agriculturists to

io A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

take collective action. When the wind blows
across the hills and the open plains it blows
across the ill-cultivated field of the bad farmer,
and with ruthless impartiality wafts argosies of
thistledown on to the well-tilled fields of the
good farmer. The wind is no respecter of
persons, nor is the rain, which may cause the
well-drained fields to become water-logged,
should the adjoining farmer or landowner
refuse to clean out his ditches and water-
courses, or because the river banks are not
repaired. With a callous disregard for the
virtues of a good husbandman insect pests and
fungi will, if they are left to flourish and mul-
tiply in the lichen, moss-covered orchards and
fields of the careless cultivator, attack clean
fruit trees and growing crops which have been
sprayed by the diligent farmer. Warble flies,
disliking the smell of sheep-dip on the backs of
well-groomed cattle in one field, have an exas-
perating way of depositing their eggs in the
bodies of the untreated beasts that graze in the
next ; and the national loss in punctured hides
amounts to a very considerable sum. An
epidemic of fluke amongst sheep in a wet
season recks little of the futile efforts of a few
isolated farmers patiently using scientific pre-
ventatives. Swine fever will spread from the
ill-regulated sty to the model piggery without
any respect for the feelings of the sanitary
enthusiast. Calves dropped by tubercular cows,

FAILURE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE u

which we make no attempt to put through the
tuberculin test, may be purchased unwittingly
by careful dairymen, and the milk from such
cows will be consumed by infants without even
the cowkeeper's knowledge.

If there is one industry, surely, which cannot
be left to the tender mercies of private enter-
prise, it is agriculture. Yet, even when the
cataclysm of war swept over us, it was the one
industry in which private enterprise was
allowed to remain almost unchecked or un-
guided — I might say unprotected, if that word
did not give rise to so much misunderstanding.
Protection is needed against the foe within our
gates, rather than against the enemy without —
not only protection from weeds, pests, diseases,
bad drainage, and bad cultivation, but also from
game. In spite of Agricultural Holdings Acts,
the lust for the big bag goes on to-day un-
checked, to the detriment of agriculture.
Whilst one man, be he landowner or sporting
tenant-farmer, is allowed to rear pheasants and
harbour rabbits without let or hindrance, and the
farmer on the other side of the hedge has no
other remedy than a shadowy compensation (with
no right to kill game or ferret his neighbour's
banks, which are the breeding-ground of the
invading army of rabbits), it is useless for the
good farmer to attempt to grow corn or even
good herbage.

12 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

Before the War we took little heed of these
things. Wheat produced on distant prairies
poured into our granaries at the docks from the
holds of great ships filled with the staff of life,
and it came across the oceans at less freightage
costs from San Francisco to Barrow-in-Furness
than it did from Melton Constable in Norfolk
to London. Derelict fields in English counties,
which once grew abundant wheat, became
grazing ground for cattle. A slight recovery
in farming prospects took place before the War,
through the increasing demand for milk ; but
this did not mean more work for the plough,
or the settlement of a larger rural population.
On the contrary, the rural exodus went on with
fatal facility enfeebling the heart of Old
England. In many districts more and more
farms were engrossed and became ranches for
cows and store cattle, and the labourer, who
remained on the land, had become even more
dependent upon the goodwill of his master
than when Gray wrote his immortal Elegy or
Crabbe his Poems, for he was now, through the
operations of century-old Acts of Enclosure,
entirely divorced from the soil.

It is recorded that in one parish alone a
single owner absorbed over thirty small free-
holds, and Sir Daniel Hall, in his Agriculture
after the War, cites an instance of a man who,
partly by purchase and partly by hiring,
obtained the control of some 8600 acres which

FAILURE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE 13

have ever since been worked as a vast sheep
farm. On the portion owned the whole of the
land has been laid down to grass ; the cottages,
and in many cases the farmhouses and build-
ings, have been allowed to fall into ruin, and
two hamlets have been completely depopulated.
Just prior to the War, on one property consist-
ing formerly of five farms and totalling 1360
acres, two men only were regularly employed.
On another group of 1500 acres four men
were regularly employed where about seventy
once found work.

The labourer's average wage, including all
extras, was then about 17s. od. a week, and
one out of every two or three labourers lived
in a farm-tied cottage, where, if he possessed a
family, he remained manacled like a serf.
There was the open road, it was true, which
many young men speedily took, but that road
led to no security of employment, and debt held
the father of a family like a bondman until
harvest came round ; and after harvest the
lean days of winter stared him in the face.

The landowner and the farmer passed their
lives untroubled, for the most part, by Acts of
Parliament. Each in his own way lived the
life of a feudal chief. Here it might be an
owner, there a large tenant-farmer, who had
become the lord of the soil, and whose word
was law in the employment of labour, stereo-
typing a low standard for wages in the letting

14 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

of cottages, or in the dispensing of the loaves
and fishes. Nothing disturbed the even tenor
of their ways in the realm of private enterprise.
No Labour Union dared to dictate the rate of
wages, nor complain of insanitary cottages, nor
hint that the land was not being properly
cultivated, nor, if he wanted a roof over his
head, dared a man suggest the reduction of game.
Indeed, the labourer was not averse to game-
preserving for, as meat was not plentiful in his
larder, and wages were exceedingly low, an
occasional rabbit, short or "long-tailed," caught
in a surreptitiously placed snare, did not come
amiss. The Small Holdings Act of 1908
might, it is true, have become a thorn in the
flesh of the prosperous farmer, but there were
many ways of making it inoperative, and after
all, not 1 per cent, of the total number of
holdings was taken as small holdings in the
first seven years under this Act.

The landowner bred as many head of
pheasants as he chose, the farmer grew what
crops he chose — even docks and thistles — let
the land down to grass as he chose, paid what
wages he chose, worked his men the long
customary hours, often without overtime pay-
ment, on the strength of an additional gallon
of cider or beer, or on the promise of a harvest
supper. Viewed from a national standpoint of
production we can no longer remain indifferent
to the failure or success of the farming industry.

FAILURE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE 15

It is of small moment to most of us as citizens
if a boot manufacturer, owing to the lack of
modern machinery, or through mismanage-
ment of any kind, fails in his business. Other
boot manufacturers will soon supply the demand
for boots. A manufacturer cannot afford to be
unenterprising.

In farming the case is different. An in-
dolent farmer who rents under a landlord who
is indifferent to good cultivation somehow
manages to carry on for a great number of years
in a slovenly manner, so long as he can make a
margin of profit which will provide him with
the necessities of life. But the worst of it is
that while he remains in possession the nation
suffers. The adjoining farmer, if he is already
farming "high," cannot make up the loss
accruing to the nation by the want of enter-
prise on the part of the indolent. Very often
it is not indolence, nor being overrun by game,
but the lack of capital, the lack of labour
power ; but loss to the nation inevitably
follows.

There is also the farmer who "farms to
leave " — who corrodes the potential capital in
land. The loss to the nation does not even
stop here. The owner of a large estate may
also be short of capital, and with the best will
in the world is unable to supply his tenants
with adequate buildings, and through this kind
of "private enterprise" probably the nation

1 6 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

suffers far more than through habitual laziness
and ignorance on the part of the farmer. Thus
many an indolent, unenterprising landowner or
farmer, protected by the barbed wire of private
enterprise, has squatted upon acres and acres
of our diminishing cultivated areas, and has
remained undisturbed, a menace to Britain with-
in her encircling seas.

• ••••••

Then came the War ; and in less than two
years we were threatened with imminent starv-
ation as incoming food-ship after food-ship
was sent to the bottom of the sea by German
submarines. It took us nearly three years to
discover, in our slow, blundering way, that
private enterprise on English acres was not
delivering the goods. England was producing
only £4 to the acre to Belgium's ^20. Whilst
Germany was producing enough food from
every 100 acres to feed seventy-five persons,
the United Kingdom only fed forty persons
from 100 acres. Private enterprise was dis-
covered to be — I was going to say a man of
straw, but that simile is too good, for if we had
possessed the straw we should have had the
grain — private enterprise was discovered to be
a man of sawdust. It was not until the end of
1916 that we passed the Defence of the Realm
(Acquisition of Land) Act, and it was not
until 191 7 that County Agricultural Executive
Committees were set up, under the Cultivation

FAILURE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE 17

of Lands Order, 191 7, armed with the drastic
powers of Regulation 2 m, which could deter-
mine the lease of any person who by reason
of incompetency or persistent neglect did not
make proper use of his land.

In spite of the spirit of brotherhood which
leapt like a flame to the hearts of most men,
while facing the common danger of starvation
and invasion, stimulating the squire to grasp
the hand in fellowship of the poacher (he might
turn out to be a useful sniper), inspiring the
farmer to drive his man to the nearest tribunal
in order to extol his labours as essential to the
conduct of the farm (oh, what wonderfully
short memories now have we that victory is
ours !) ; in spite of duchesses who became
dairymaids, the goods were not being de-
livered, and private enterprise began to bear
an aspect of fear when confronted with a
multitude of islanders demanding bread. Sud-
denly agriculture as a cult became fashionable.
Indeed, it stood in some danger of being
suffocated by aristocratic patronage. " Let
us," I heard Lord Ernie, when President of
the Board of Agriculture, say in the drawing-
room of the Countess of Sandwich, " let us
have a sense of proportion. Do not let us talk
about bees. Marie Antoinette became a dairy-
maid when the people of France clamoured for
bread. But she was too late. Let us not be
too late."

1 8 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

We were very nearly too late in insisting
upon the invasion of private property and
setting the plough to work — very nearly. It
was not until the winter of 1917-18 that we
managed to plough up 1,806,601 acres of grass
land. The Corn Production Act was passed
in August 191 7, but what was more efficacious
in the enforcement of good cultivation was the
formation of County Agricultural Committees
with plenary powers. D.O.R.A. (2 m) speedily
became the community's Diana in the hunting
of big and little game. She, with shameless
effrontery, shot her shafts in the private deer
parks and the game preserve. Venison and
pheasant, strangely enough, appeared on tables
other than those of the rich. Landowners re-
garded this invasion of the rights of private
property with mixed feelings. Those who had
lost something far more precious than private
property resigned themselves to the will of the
nation ; others, who posed as patriots and sat
in the highest places of the realm, put up
a stubborn fight against this invasion by the
public, " For they had many possessions."
But they, too, had to succumb as the tractor
remorselessly ploughed its way through the
well-groomed turf of many an ancestral park.
Farmers, who had waited so long for a tariff
to give them high prices without the exertion
of producing more corn, now found themselves
harnessed to a machine which was driven by

FAILURE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE 19

fellow-farmers, who shouted directions as they
ruthlessly tore up their unproductive acres,
whilst others sent out with the drill were told
what seed to sow according to the needs of
the nation.

A six years' charter had been drawn up,
which guaranteed farmers against serious loss
for sowing wheat and oats, by the fixing of
minimum prices. That was the carrot held in
front of them as they toiled across the furrows ;
but the size of the carrot was not to their liking,
and the longer they ploughed the smaller be-
came the carrot. County Agricultural Execu-
tive Committees would see that game should
not eat up their crops ; rents would not be
raised if the guaranteed prices came into effect ;
and the labourer should have what Mr. Lloyd
George was pleased to call a living wage of
25s. a week, including all allowances, which
sum could be further increased should the
newly-set-up Agricultural Wages Boards so
decide.

When this Act was passing through its
difficult birth, in August 19 17, an attempt was
made by the Labour Party to raise the minimum
wage to 30s. instead of 25s. But Mr. Prothero,
with the plaintive wail of a plover passing over
derelict fields scarred with cattle hoofs, said
that the Corn Production Act would, if 30s.
was fixed as a minimum, soon become a Grass
Production Act. In spite of this pessimistic

20 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

prediction, in a few months' time the minimum
for England and Wales became 30s., and in
1920 it had risen to 46s.

This interference with the rights of an em-
ployer, who had been accustomed to give almost
any wage he chose, was naturally resented, but
it soon became evident to all that as men daily
slipped away from the land to shoulder a rifle
or to make ammunition, corn would never be
produced unless labourers were ensured, not
only a reasonable wage, but also a status far
different from that which they had held in the
past. In effect the Act said, "You farmers
must give up individual bargaining with men,
and join a union to discuss the payment of
wages over wide areas ; and you workers must
be organised as well, in order to elect your
representatives to sit on the Agricultural Wages
Board and your District Wages Committees,
in equal numbers with the farmers, in order to
arrive at decisions and make the Act operative."

The result was magical. To-day, in many
counties, 90 per cent, of the farmers are
enrolled in the National Farmers' Union, and
300,000 farm workers are members of either
the National Union of Agricultural Workers
or of the Workers' Union. Nor did inter-
ference with private enterprise stop at this.
The hours for which labourers should work
without payment of overtime were to be fixed
by mutual agreement between employers and

FAILURE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE 21

employed. No farmer could charge more than
3s. for a farm-tied cottage in lieu of wages ; and
milk, potatoes, board and lodging were to be
supplied at prices the Board should determine.
Orders were issued as to the prices at which
milk, beef, mutton, wool, pork, bacon, eggs,
veal, potatoes, and fruit were to be sold.
Heifer calves were not allowed to be slaughtered
to make dainty lunches for profiteers.

Thus out of the welter of war we see the
emergence of Hodge from the lowly position
of a farm hand, dictated to and dragooned by
farmer, policeman, parson, and squire, to a
status as a citizen whose advice and experience
were sought, not only by Boards fixing wages
and hours, by Food Control Committees, but
even by County Agricultural Executive Com-
mittees, where he began to appear, though
often a lonely figure, seated side by side with
wealthy farmers, and adjudicating with them
as to whether farms were properly cultivated
or not, and in many cases deciding upon the
determination of the leases of ill-cultivated
lands.

CHAPTER II

HOW COUNTY EXECUTIVE COMMITTEES
TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION

SINCE Arthur Young published his famous
Travels, Sir Rider Haggard his Survey,
Sir Daniel Hall his Pilgrimage of British
Farming, we have not had so illuminating a
report of the condition of British farming as is
to be found in the extracts issued from time to
time by the Ministry of Agriculture in their
Journal of the work of the County Agricultural
Committees. Those who care to plod through
the pages of the Minutes of Evidence of the
Royal Com?nission on Agriculture, /pig to
1920, on which I sat as a member, will find
much upon which to reflect. For the moment
these Reports will suffice and, though it is
unfortunate that there is no complete published
Report, we can glean from the pages of the
Journal a sufficient revelation of the nakedness
of our land.

It must not be supposed that these Reports
were intended to reveal to us the nakedness of
the land ; they were published to show what
splendid work County Executive Committees

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 23

have done, as indeed they have. In studying
this display of energy we learn what we have
lost and are losing in food production by leav-
ing our most vital industry to the tender
mercies of private enterprise, and allowing it
to get adrift as a ship without a rudder.

Let me say first of all that England and
Scotland — and especially Scotland — contain
some of the finest farmers that are to be found
in the whole world. As breeders of shorthorn
cattle and of sheep the reputation of individual
British farmers is world-wide and needs no
defence ; but the virtues of these individuals
are not extensive enough to cloak the incom-
petence of many of those who occupy the land
not only as tenant-farmers, but also as owners.
Indeed, in examining these Reports, I find that
the worst husbandmen are those who are
occupying-owners, which is in itself a damaging
criticism of the argument that all would be well
with British farming if every one could own the
little patch of land he occupies as tenant !

We have, it is true, some excellent land-
owners who take their profession as seriously
as does a doctor of medicine or of divinity, and
I am prepared to take off my hat to landowners
such as Lord Rayleigh, Lord Bledisloe, Lord
Selborne, Mr. Acland, Mr. Buchanan, or Mr.
Christopher Turnor, but their unco-ordinated
efforts are but backwaters in the turgid stream
of our national agricultural life. From a

24 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

national standpoint the efforts of one or two
civil servants had a more far-reaching effect
than the individual efforts of our best farmers
and best landowners. The nation owes its
debt of gratitude to men like Sir Daniel Hall,
and Mr. F. C. L. Floud, C.B. (who was the
chief official of the Food Production Depart-
ment), and those other much maligned
" bureaucrats," with their subordinate associates,
who constituted the driving force behind the
Cultivation Orders, rather than to the Ministers
of State who gesticulate so grandiosely before
the public.

Now let us see what a few extracts from
these Reports reveal to us as to the condition
of the land in many an agricultural district of
England, even at the time when the nation's
food supply was in peril.

" Baynard's Estate, Cranleigh, is an estate
situated on the Surrey and Sussex borders,
distant 3 miles from Cranleigh, and comprising
some 1362 acres, of which 405 acres were
arable, 457 acres pasture, and 500 acres were
occupied by woods, buildings, roads, etc.

"The estate was purchased by its present
owner some sixteen years ago ; some 250 acres
had been allowed to go out of cultivation, and
were covered with briars, seedling birch trees,
rough grass, and weeds. The extensive farm
buildings were unused, and the cottages stood
empty ; except for a few horses there was no

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 25

stock kept, and the land was overrun with
game and rabbits, of which the extensive woods
held a large stock. The woods mainly served
as game covert, though there was some fair
timber, but the single trees in the arable land
offered considerable difficulties to cultivation.
The soil is of a heavy character, sub-soil clay
and gravel, and in some places is of a brashy
nature, while much of it lies very wet."

As the owner was unable to comply with the
Committee's wishes to bring the arable land
again under the plough, and to convert some of
the pasture to arable, the estate was entered
upon and possession taken by the Committee.
Three good neighbouring farmers, Messrs.
Johnston, Sadler, and Fortune, agreed to
cultivate the land in accordance with a scheme
framed by the Committee through their
Executive Officer, and this resulted in 447
acres of corn being added to the supply of the
nation, and in the grass land carrying twice
the head of stock it carried previously. It
is interesting to note that 17 acres of oats
grown by the owner yielded only 20 quarters,
weighing 28 lb. per bushel !

Nevertheless, the last act of this comedy has
not yet been played. It is possible for the
ground landlord, after the community has
immensely improved the fertility of the soil,
to present a claim for damages ! Thus we
see, under laws provided with loopholes for

N

26 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

vested interests, how a landlord can gaily drive
a four-in-hand through an Act of Parliament,
and can smilingly, at the end of his adventure,
hold out his hand for pence !

" Case No. 4 (Essex). — This farm is typical
of some 12,000 acres of heavy grass land in the
county. About twenty years ago the farm was
acquired as a building estate, and sold out in
small plots. A few tin shanties were erected,
and one or two plots were pegged out ; other-
wise nothing was done. The land became
overgrown with scrub, and barely sufficed to
maintain a few cattle and sheep in store con-
dition. Hedges grew wild, ditches filled up,
and drains became blocked. The farm was
taken over by the Committee in the summer
of 19 1 7, and cultivation began in the early
autumn under the direction of an experienced
local farmer. An inspection was made on the
7th May 1918." I will not detail the cultural
methods employed, as I am afraid these might
weary the general reader, but I will merely
state that of the total area of 166 acres, 82 acres
were under crop, 35 acres were bare fallow in
preparation for wheat the following autumn,
whilst 49 acres were left in grass. The Report
goes on to say that the " transformation effected
on this land reflects the greatest credit on the
management."

"Case No. 5 (Hampshire).' — This is a com-
pact farm of 600 acres in extent, mostly arable,

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 27

and situated on clay or red loam, of good
quality, underlying the chalk. For about twenty
years before the War it had been occupied by
successive owners, but previously its rental
value would probably have been 10s. or 12s. an
acre. In 19 16, when the farm was brought to
the notice of the Board, the owner and occupier
of the farm was a wealthy business man who
only occasionally visited his property, which was
managed by his bailiff. A Report made to the
Board in February 191 7, showed that the farm
was then in a deplorable condition, due to an
utter lack of business management. There
were 1 7 corn ricks on the farm of the harvests
of 1914, 19 1 5, 19 16, all infested with vermin
and rapidly wasting. The stock comprised 13
horses, 100 ill-conditioned sheep, and 16 young
cattle. There was an indifferent equipment of
implements, including two serviceable grass-
cutters and two binders, but much of the
machinery lying about was broken down or out
of order. The arable land had been allowed to
get extremely foul, and nearly 200 acres were
stated to be in such a condition that only a
summer fallow and a most thorough cleaning
could possibly restore it to a condition in which
it could grow crops. The labour on the farm,
though scanty, was sufficient, properly directed,
to have produced far better results."

This last remark is interesting, because it
illustrates the point that, however efficient farm

28 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

workers may be themselves, if their labour is
ill-directed by an incompetent farmer or bailiff
it is more or less wasted ; and farm labourers
feel this more bitterly, perhaps, than any other
form of injustice. The landlord's responsibility
cannot be shifted on to the shoulders of a bailiff
or foreman. The nation rightly holds the
landlord to account, for whilst he remains in
possession he prevents the good husbandman
from cultivating the land, and the nation
suffers.

"The farm was taken over by the Agri-
cultural Executive Committee in March 191 7,
and a bailiff installed who worked under the
direct supervision of the Committee's Executive
Officer. An inspection was made in June 191 8.
Of the ploughed area, 400 acres were then
under grain crops, and 100 acres under fallow.
. . . Owing to the extremely neglected con-
dition of this farm when taken over by the
Committee it was not expected that a model
farm would materialise in a short time. There
is no doubt, however, that the condition of the
farm is being rapidly improved, and the work is
a useful object-lesson to the district."

The condition of this farm reminds me of a
tract of country I once walked over in 19 10 in
North Hampshire, and I wonder if any great
improvement is visible. As I walked across a
field where the withered unharvested grasses
and the tall, seed-bearing wild parsley and

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 29

thistles were shoulder-high, rabbits scurried
away at almost every step I took, while pheas-
ants and partridges filled the air with the whir
of wings. The first cottage I stumbled across
was literally falling down. The thatch had long
since disappeared, leaving the rafters and beams
as bare as bones to the open sky. As I entered
the village I came to a row of four cottages
under one roof. Only one of these was occu-
pied ; the other three, with their doors and
windows battered in, had been left as desolations
in which rats might play havoc, and through
which the moaning wind might fitfully wander.
From the occupied cottage issued a slatternly
young wife with a sporting dog at her heels. It
was probably the gamekeeper's. The villagers
told me that when a cottage became unoccupied
no attempt was ever made by the owner to keep
it in repair. Where pheasants are wanted the
peasant is not.

On one side of the valley which runs from
Inkpen Beacon to Hurstbourne Tarrant, where
fields given over to the thistle, the wild carrot,
and the burdock form a vast rabbit warren, I
could detect that the plough had at one time
been at work.

Though this was the high road from Hunger-
ford to Andover, innumerable rabbits crossed and
recrossed it in the broad daylight, and the
feeling of isolation grew upon me until I began
to wonder if I were really in over-populated

30 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

England. No hedges flanked the road, nor
ditches either ; for on each side was a broad
stretch of green grass divided by this white
ribbon of a road, and beyond the grass, tier
upon tier, rose oaks and beeches. It might
have been a valley in some distant, uninhabited
country, and the tropical, flaming patches of
herb-willow served but to heighten the illusion.
I lay down upon the grass by the roadside to
rest and to drink in the beauty of the valley.
Save for the flapping of the wings of the pigeons,
and the poignant cry of the plover, not a sound
was to be heard. . . . When I rose, greensward
and roadway were speckled with the white tufts
of the bobbing tails of countless rabbits, and
as I walked forward companies of them kept
retreating like an army at the sound of the
bugle. The sight was enough to stir the blood
of the most indifferent of poachers !

Grass grew avidly in the middle of the road.
It had time to grow, apparently, between the
going of one cart and the coming of the next.
I was not surprised to find when I reached
Hurstbourne Tarrant (which Cobbett used to
call Uphusband) that all the available accom-
modation had been taken by "the shooters
from London."1

It is generally assumed by townsmen that
the occupier of a farm must necessarily be a
practical man having some knowledge of farm-

1 Vide The Awakening of England, by F. E. Green.

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 31

ing, but it is apparent from several instances
cited in these Reports that this by no means
follows. They give two instances in the county
of Kent. One was of a farm of 216 acres, " in
a deplorable condition, having been occupied by
a tenant with no knowledge of farming." Yet,
curiously enough, this tenant was allowed to
remain on the farm as foreman (!) under the in-
structions of a supervisor appointed by the
Committee, and the Board's technical expert
reported in August 19 18, that a "marvellous
transformation " had taken place in the cultiva-
tion in spite of the handicap of an inefficient
foreman. The tenancy was subsequently de-
termined, and the farm is still in the hands of
the Committee. The other, Case No. 6 (Kent),
was a farm of 230 acres which " had been occu-
pied for four years by a man who had formerly
been a coachman, and who possessed neither
the capital, experience, nor ability to make a
successful foreman. He seemed to have kept
few stock of any kind, and to have regarded
much of the land as uncultivable. About half
the Down land affords useful grazing, but no use
whatever was made of it. Hedges were over-
grown and neglected, and fences and gates were
allowed to fall to pieces. Some idea of the
neglected state of the farm may be gathered
from the fact that a well-known valuer, appointed
by the Committee to make an inspection, re-
ported that it was not worth cultivating. Two

32 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

members of the Committee — both local farmers
— had, however, known the farm under better
conditions, and on their recommendation the
Committee decided to take it over. The tenant
was allowed to remain in occupation of the
farmhouse and to act as foreman under the
instructions of a member of the Committee.

"The farm was inspected in August 19 18.
The cropping of the arable land which had
been cleaned and well cultivated was as
follows : Wheat (47 acres) looking well and
promising, 5 quarters per acre; Oats (15
acres) a good crop, expected to yield 6 quarters
per acre ; etc." Here, again, the inspector's
Report spoke of the " marvellous transforma-
tion " which had taken place.

Case No. 7 (Leicestershire) gives an in-
teresting instance of a field of 20 acres which
was mostly under gorse when the Committee
took possession, yet was made to yield a crop
estimated at 7 quarters per acre.

Another instance of an owner-occupier found
guilty of bad farming is cited in Case No.
8 (Norfolk). This was a farm of 350 acres,
which seems to have been given over chiefly
to the cultivation of weeds. As requests to
clean the land and grow corn were ignored,
the Committee stepped in and took possession ;
and as the owner-occupier was not short of
capital it was arranged that the Committee
should farm the land with his money. Essential

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 33

repairs were made to the farm buildings, which
were in a very dilapidated condition. Of the
five cottages on the farm only one was habitable,
two were past repair, and the other two were
made habitable by the Committee. It was
estimated that over ^"3000 was added to the
value of the grain grown in 19 18 through the
efforts of the Committee.

Case No. 9 (Rutland) is another interesting
illustration of the unenterprising occupying-
owner. This was a park of about 900 acres,
about half of which was taken over by deer
and rabbits. Some 300 acres of this park
were ploughed. "

The next case, No. 10 (Somerset), is also an
illustration of mismanagement by an occupying-
owner. This farm "comprises 286 acres, of
which about 164 acres are occupied by the
owner and the remainder (all grass) let out
for grazing. The land was in an absolutely
derelict condition when taken over ; the arable
land (upwards of 40 acres) was full of weeds,
and it had not been cropped for from two
to five years ; the fences in bad repair and
overgrown with docks, brambles, and thistles ;
the buildings needed repairing. With the
Board's approval, possession of the greater
part (164 acres) was taken in August 191 7,
and the remainder a few weeks later ; and it
was decided to make use of the farm as a
training centre for soldiers."

3

34 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

After describing how the Committee culti-
vated the land, the Report adds: "The de-
cision to use the farm as a training centre
for soldiers was fully justified by the results.
Accommodation had been found for 30-40 men
at a time. During the six months previous
to the inspection between 70 and 80 men
had been trained and sent out. The Inspector
reported that in his opinion great credit was
due to the management for the way in which,
with quite unskilled labour, the condition of
the farm had been so greatly improved since
the Committee's occupation.

Case No. 1 1 (Staffordshire). — This farm of
1 1 3 acres was reported to be the most derelict
farm the Committee's Executive Officer had ever
seen. Ninety acres, which should have been
arable, were overrun with twitch grass, and
the only stock on the farm was & or 10 cattle,
and about the same number of horses. The
Committee took possession in March 191 8.

Case No. 12 (E. Suffolk) is again an in-
stance of the mismanagement of an occupying-
owner. When he purchased the farm in 191 2
it " was in fair order, but had since been allowed
to fall into a deplorable condition. . . . There
is an absence of any regular system of crop-
ping. There were 4 horses on the farm (148
acres) one of which was a fair, useful animal,
the other three very inferior. There is a
good house empty and a good cottage empty.

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 35

Buildings generally are out of repair and
very dilapidated."

The production of wheat in 19 17 amounted
to only 2 to 2\ qrs. per acre. After the Com-
mittee took it over, the wheat crop (50 acres)
was estimated to yield 5 to 7 qrs. per acre.

Case No. 13 (Warwickshire) presents an
amazing picture. " This land was brought to
the notice of the Board in the summer of 19 17.
The area consisted of a farm of about 160 acres,
which had been in the tenant's occupation for
twenty-seven years, and was entirely in grass,
except for a neglected field of about 9 acres ;
and of an adjoining farm of about 305 acres
over which the same tenant had shooting rights,
but which, except for this, was unlet and un-
occupied and had not been farmed for thirty
years. In a Report to the Agricultural Ex-
ecutive Committee the latter farm was described
as generally overgrown with thorn bushes, and
infested with rabbits, while the ground was
covered with worthless herbage. The stock
on the tenanted farm comprised 9 cows (7 in
milk), 12 calves, 2 ponies, and 1 cart-horse, all
being in very poor condition. The tenant
worked the farm without any outside labour.
The farm buildings and cottages were either
in bad repair or derelict. The whole area
(465 acres) was stated to have been previously
let at a rental of ^500 a year, and the late
tenant had grown 60 bushels per acre on

36 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

part of the land. With the Board's approval
the Committee took possession of the entire
area, and immediately set about the work of
reclamation and cultivation. The work was
done entirely by means of prisoner labour, for
which a camp with accommodation for about
ioo prisoners was found on the farm.

" The first operation the Committee had to
undertake was to clear the land ; this they did
by cutting down the bush in the first instance,
and then systematically uprooting the stumps
with steam tackle. In this way they cleared
close upon ioo acres in 19 17, and cropped it
with beans (27 acres), oats and barley (60
acres), and potatoes (9 acres). The Inspector's
Report runs thus : ' The hedges, which had
run wild and could hardly be distinguished
from the " bush," have all been cut down to
the ground, and many hundred yards of ditches
have been opened and cleared. The work
has been carried out under the direction of a
member of the Executive Committee, with the
assistance of a resident bailiff. The clearing of
the farm and bringing it back to cultivation
was a very big undertaking indeed, and the
Committee deserve the greatest credit for what
they have been able to accomplish.' "

Previous to taking over this land its letting
value was just its sporting or shooting value,
about 5s. per acre ; to-day the Committee
consider that its letting value is 20s. per acre.

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 37

The Journal (August 1920) informs us of
cases where legal proceedings have been
taken to enforce the Cultivation Orders since
Armistice Day. It should be borne in mind
that after the Armistice the compulsory break-
ing up of grass land ceased, and the work of the
Agricultural Committees consisted, or should
have consisted, in improving the general stand-
ard of farming in their respective counties.
There was, unfortunately, a general slackening
all round. Cultivation Orders were only served
where the rules of good husbandry were not
being observed, or where, in other respects,
land was being neglected. The cases cited
illustrate, as much as the preceding ones, how
bad farmers will not even study their own
financial interest in the cultivation of the land, and
how they cannot be trusted to carry out Cultiva-
tion Orders, which have only been issued, since
the Armistice, where ill-cultivation is of too
scandalous a nature to be overlooked.

"(I) In East Suffolk ^ acres of good corn-
growing land were bought in 191 8, and the
purchaser turned out the tenant, a good
farmer, after asking a rent which was more
than the land was worth. The land was then
allowed to lie idle and become derelict, in
spite of the service of Cultivation Orders by
the Agricultural Executive Committee. The
owner was, therefore, prosecuted for failure
to comply with the Orders, and fined ^20,

1 1

38 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

or, in default of payment, six weeks' imprison-
ment.

"(II) A notice to plough 6 acres of land
was served on a farmer in Worcestershire in
August 1919, but no action had been taken by
him up to February 1920. It was shown that
the land had lain derelict since the 19 18
harvest, and about £&o worth of food was lost
to the nation. The defaulter was prosecuted
and fined £\o and £2, 2s. costs.

"(IV) A prosecution for a disregard of
Cultivation Orders issued by the Surrey Com-
mittee resulted in the occupying-owner of the
land being fined £50, and his agent ^10.
The Orders in question were issued in October
and November 19 18, and required that cer-
tain arable fields should be cleaned and culti-
vated in preparation for food crops for the
harvest of 19 19. Practically nothing was
done, however, to carry out these Orders up
to 19 1 9.

"(V) An occupier of a field of 23 acres in
Kent was recently prosecuted to comply with a
Cultivation Order. The field contained a large
quantity of thistles, brambles, gorse, and ant-
hills, which the occupier was instructed to
remove and destroy. The thistles were dealt
with, but very little action was taken to remove
the other1 rubbish, which encumbered a large
proportion of the field. The defendant was
fined ,£20 and £5, 5s. costs, and has been

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 39

served with a further Order to carry out the
necessary work."

These instances are sufficient to show the
waste of time and the loss of crops to the
nation involved in this system of farming by
inspectorship, even when the inspectors were
still armed with Orders under D.O.R.A., which
cease to operate as soon as the Agriculture
Act comes into force. Indeed D.O.R.A. had
already fallen into disuetude. This is un-
fortunate, for "21" got land cultivated with-
out the tedious tergiversation of Part IV. of the
Corn Production Act. Under Article (I) (f) of
Regulation 2 m, to quote the Ministry's own
words, "the Ministry may determine the
tenancy of an occupier of land who by reason
of incompetence or persistent neglect shows
that he cannot make proper use of his land.
This drastic step was only taken after repeated
warnings, and usually after several Cultivation
Notices had been served without effect. The
notice may be nullified if on appeal by the
tenant to arbitration, on the question whether
the holding has been properly cultivated, the
arbitrator takes the view that it has been. It
is of interest that out of twenty cases where the
tenant exercised his right of appeal the decision
was against the tenant in every case. The
total number of Determination Notices issued
since January 191 7, is 809, relating to an area
of 61,000 acres."

40 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

So long have occupiers of land, whether they
be tenants or owners, been left monarchs of all
they survey, even from the top of a weather-
beaten manure heap or a field of couch-grass,
that it is only natural they should, as a class,
resent interference from any one. The pill
carried no sugar with it when the Cultivation
Order came from a Committee comprised of
fellow-farmers, instead of from bureaucrats in
Whitehall. On the contrary, it made the dose
all the more nauseous. I knew that a farmer
of a certain type would cut off his nose to
spite his face in his obstinate determination to
farm as badly as he chose. I knew, for in-
stance, a farmer who, in war-time, refused to
cut his grass rather than pay soldiers 4s. 6d. a
day at a time labour was scarce. But it is from
the sober pages of the Journal that I learn of a
small farmer in Buckinghamshire who refused
to have his oats cut because part of his farm
had been ploughed up by horses and men
supplied by the Agricultural Executive Com-
mittee ! Rather than harvest a magnificent
crop of oats, such as he could never hope to
grow himself, he allowed his cattle to stray in
the field while the crop was still standing, and
he was convicted and fined under the Growing
Corn (Crops) Order, 191 7. The Ministry
finally determined the tenancy of the farm in
February 1920.

It seems incredible that a Northamptonshire

TRIED TO SAVE THE SITUATION 41

farmer of 242 acres should not only ill-cultivate
his farm, but that he should not take the
trouble, when hay stood at famine prices, to
thatch even one of his four stacks of hay. Nor
does it seem credible that a tenant of a farm of
262 acres in Glamorganshire, which was de-
scribed as " thoroughly foul," should allow his
stock to wander at their own sweet will from
field to field damaging growing crops. Yet
we have it on the word of the Ministry of
Agriculture.

The northern farmer apparently is a more
stubborn monarch to deal with than his
negligent and incompetent brother of the
South. "This farm," reports the Journal,
" was in a notoriously dilapidated condition,
neither the owner nor the occupier (both of
whom resided in the farmhouse) being capable
of farming it properly. The service of Cultiva-
tion Notices had not the slightest effect, although
the tenant was prosecuted and fined for negli-
gence. The Committee also made unsuccessful
efforts to persuade the owner to let the farm to
a capable tenant, and finally, with the approval
of the Ministry, took possession of the land and
began to cultivate it, the owner and occupier
being left in possession of the farmhouse. The
owner and occupier obstructed the Committee
and threatened violence, and for this they were
summoned and each fined £2$ and £\o costs.
The land has now been let by the Committee

42 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

to a tenant who has made good progress with
the cultivation."

Now that the Durham County Council has,
I believe, a majority of miners upon it, I do
not think it is very likely that this class of
owner or occupier would be treated with such
tender solicitude ; but, unfortunately, the power
of compelling good cultivation has been rendered
almost innocuous now that we are blessed with
an Agriculture Act which reduces those
responsible for enforcing good farming by
inspectorship to a state of impotence.

CHAPTER III
NOBLESSE OBLIGE

I HAVE quoted somewhat lengthily from
the official Reports of the County Agri-
cultural Executive Committees, 19 17—
20, because they give us a penetrating insight
into the condition of English farming, and at
the same time because I wanted to give them
every credit for what they have done when they
went forth on to the untilled fields to use that
powerful weapon, D.O.R.A. 2 m.

It is through the operations of these Com-
mittees we have now a survey made by farmers
themselves of practically all the cultivated area
of Great Britain. True, it has taken a European
War to produce such a survey. Nevertheless,
we now have enduring documentary proof
which neither landowners nor farmers can re-
fute, for it has been graven by their own hands.
What they have done to rectify matters, even
in a small way, is an earnest of the things
they might do if they would act in co-operation
with the whole community.

These Reports show us how it is possible for

occupiers and owners to remain in business

43

44 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

undisturbed by competition for a number of
years, and to treat the raw material over which
they work or slumber as though it were a rabbit
warren, a pheasant preserve, or a wilderness
for the grazing of rough cattle — and even to do
this at a time when the nation was on short
rations for food. In no other industry, even
under capitalism, is this possible.

One would have thought that at a time of
national stress, when our food supply was im-
perilled by the acts of ruthless and daring
submarine commanders, that the old English
nobility would have risen to the sublimity of
the appeal to patriotism and thrown open the
gates of their spacious parks to the tractor and
the seed-drill, in order that the nation should
not suffer from the want of bread or milk. One
would have thought that whilst many men were
giving all they had to give — their lives — our
nobility would have gladly turned over a few
acres of their parks to produce food. Un-
fortunately for them as a class — with notable
exceptions — not only did they fail to lead, but
they failed to follow. There were nobles who
actually impeded the race between the plough
and the submarine.

In some counties, where the feudal spirit had
infected farmers with its poison of servility,
the County Agricultural Executive Committee
showed the white feather when approaching
the domains of those great landowners who

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 45

kept a pack of hounds, or held vast shooting-
rights, or were known to be liberal landlords
"if you kept on the right side of them." On
the other hand, in counties where landowners
were unpopular as a class, Executive Com-
mittees entered their parks and did their duty.
It was in districts in which farms were mostly
let at uneconomic rents that we saw the weak-
ness of Committees, composed almost entirely
of tenant-farmers.

Most of us expected in war-time, surely, that
great landowners who bore historic names,
instead of waiting for the issue of Cultivation
Orders, would themselves be taking the field
astride the tractor. Yet opposition was shown,
not only in districts which might be de-
scribed as " dukeries," but also inside the
Cabinet. Indeed, two great landowners, who
were Cabinet Ministers, put up so stubborn a
fight against the right of the nation to enter
their parks that the Prime Minister, I am told,
kindled with a spark of Celtic fire, frightened
them into submission by warning them that a
half-starved population might come and burn
down their stately country mansions.

To illustrate the extraordinary lack of public
spirit on the part of great landowners, I will
present some of my own personal investigations
made in February and March 19 18.

West Sussex is a county which is largely
owned by three historic families — the Duke of

46 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

Richmond, the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Lecon-
field, and one family which may become historic,
but which is at present classed as parvenu — Earl
Cowdray. I made this tour, it must be remem-
bered, at a time when our valuable, recreative
city parks were turned into kitchen gardens,
and when the Food Production Department had
informed us that we were seriously behindhand
with our plough programme, and that " wherever
there is willingness to raise more food a plot
shall be found if undeveloped land exists."

" I believe," said Mr. Prothero (now Lord
Ernie), on 9th February 19 18, "that the War
will be terminated by the test of endurance, and
that the country which commands the last sack
of wheat is going to win. Those who oppose
the ploughing up of grass land have not a leg
to stand on. Every additional sack of corn,
every ton of potatoes grown in this country,
brings us a step nearer victory."

Well, I wanted to see what these great land-
owners were doing on that part of their vast
estates which is not let to tenant-farmers, but
is under their own direct supervision. I made
straight for Chichester, the seat of Government
for West Sussex, where I was fortunate to
meet the Sussex farmers sitting at their Agri-
cultural Executive Committee. I should like to
say that no body of men could have treated me
with greater courtesy or frankness than these
gentlemen, some of whom farmed thousands of

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 47

acres of the richest as well as of the poorest
corn-growing land in England. They not only
gave me all the information at their disposal,
but, after a general discussion round the table,
deputed two of their members to discuss the
subject of ploughing the parks with me for a
couple of hours.

One of these farmers was the famous Mr.
Passmore, who was the first farmer in England
to try the experiment of distributing basic slag
on the chalk Downs. This resulted not only
in a surprisingly increased herbage, but also in
a larger head of stock being kept and in lambs
being fattened without cake on the slagged
downland grass. He it was who took derelict
farm after derelict farm, and managed to grow,
with the aid of artificial manures, 60 bushels of
wheat to the acre on the top of the Downs,
extending his holdings to 3500 acres.

It must not be imagined, however, that the
land covered by the large parks I surveyed lies
only on the chalk. From Petworth to the sea
you get a great variety of soil. Petworth and
Cowdray Park are chiefly on the greensand ;
West Lavington on the heavy gault clay ;
Burton on very poor greensand ; whilst West
Dean and Goodwood, though they lie mainly
on the chalk, touch also the rich valley deposits
of brick earth, which, stretching out to the sea,
form the finest corn-growing land in England.
Then there are strips of chalk, of marl, and of

48 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

upper greensand, lying along the lower slopes
of the Downs — strips fruitful of many a bumper
crop.

To know what you can do with the soil, even
with chalk soil, you must summer it and winter
it, as farmers say. A farmer told me that on one
side of a certain road, unkindly called " Starve-
lot," he could grow wheat ; but on the other
side of the road of apparently identical soil,
expressively called "Stonecrop," he could not
recover the cost of the seed.

Progressive as some of these farmers are,
they gave me the feeling that a deep-seated
veneration for feudalism still biased their
decisions. They seemed very loath to intrude
upon the Duke of Richmond's park at Good-
wood, or the Duchess of Norfolk's at Arundel,
or Lord Leconfield's at Petworth. These were
the old aristocratic families who generally made
the easiest landlords.

In spite of their protestations that they did
not care "tuppence who people were" they
invariably excused these owners of old titles on
the score that they kept up a good number of
sheep, like the Duke of Richmond ; or that
the land at Petworth Park was not worth
ploughing. It was the new squirearchy who,
they reckoned, "were the curse of the country
and bred trouble " : those city people who
bought large country estates for the sake of
sport7and added field to field to increase their

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 49

parkland, engrossing farm after farm — a state
of things which became worse when you
entered the county of Surrey.

They were proud of the fact that they had
ploughed up the trotting track at Southwick,
sowing the 24 acres with wheat, and the golf
links of Horsham and Chichester, covering
34 acres ; and 90 acres of West Grinstead
Park, where deer were kept, and 100 acres at
Shermanbury Park. But in the five large parks
which I walked over after I left Chichester —
Goodwood, West Dean, Cowdray, Petworth,
and Arundel — very little had been done.

In these five huge parks no fresh land had
been ploughed up, excepting a few acres where
the remounts had been stationed in Petworth
Park. One would imagine that noblesse oblige
would have spurred these owners of old titles
to be the first to move, following the example
of the Duke of Marlborough, instead of suffer-
ing the humiliation of being ordered to plough,
when their country was threatened by semi-
starvation, and their estates by invasion.

The Duke of Richmond had not then
received any orders to break up land. It is
true that he kept a good number of sheep —
from 1 000 to 1 100 — but as deer should give way
to sheep, so sheep should have been made to
give way to wheat. Outside the park gates a
meadow, where ewes were brought in at lamb-
ing-time, had been ploughed up, and the sheep
4

50 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

moved to a fold inside the park gates under
the shelter of the wonderful evergreen oaks.
Yet inside the park I actually found some
fields which, although ploughed in 191 7, had
been allowed to go back to grass.

There was some land at Hat Hill which
might have come under the plough with ad-
vantage to the nation, especially as there was
land adjoining, practically of the same texture,
which had been cultivated for years. Sheep
could no longer be used as an excuse. Too
long had England suffered from the sheep-
eating men, as Mr. Chesterton says in his
delightful, though erratic " History." Now
men should eat the sheep and win bread in
abundance.

Striding across Goodwood racecourse the
woods of West Dean Park become visible, and
beyond lies a valley of beautiful alluvial soil.
This estate runs, I believe, for 9 miles through
the valley, and is some of the finest corn-grow-
ing land in England. This was pointed out by
Cobbett in his Rural Rides: "And here am I
on the turnpike road from Midhurst to Chi-
chester. The land goes along through some
of the finest farms in the world. It is im-
possible for corn land and agriculture to be finer
than these." And to-day we have the authority
of Hall and Russell that " wheat is most ex-
tensively grown in the maritime districts of
Sussex, and again on the chalk, and lower and

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 51

upper greensand in West Sussex," King
Edward vil, who had an eye for pretty soil as
well as for pretty ladies, used frequently to stay
at West Dean ; but this park now belongs to
the new aristocracy of commerce, and the
Committee had ordered the breaking up of
107 acres.

Coming to Cowdray, I found the Mogul
tractor at work breaking up a part called " The
Lawns," and here the Agricultural Committee
had selected some 70 acres of undoubtedly
good turf, which had never been ploughed
before, and which looked capable of growing
bumper crops. But inside the park not a single
sod of grass had been turned over. Yet an old
man told me his grandfather had spoken to
him of the days when this land was ploughed.
Possibly an ex-Air Minister did not understand
what tightening the belt meant to those who
had to live laborious days to keep England
from starvation.

I was told by farmers at Chichester that
Petworth Park was not worth ploughing, but
when I reached Petworth, and talked to estate
men who had worked in the park for a great
number of years, I found quite a different
opinion prevailing. Take, for instance, the
level ground fronting the Midhurst road,
between the first and second eates in the
wall which, by the way, extends for 14 miles.
Here I found one man who actually remem-

52 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

bered corn being grown on that land forty-five
years ago ; and another who had helped to grub
up the hedges when it was converted into park-
land. " This is the cream of England, sir,"
exclaimed one man in his enthusiasm for the
rich fertility of the soil there. Certainly if the
allotments just outside the park walls were any
guide to its productivity, it should yield some
very fine crops. But here, again, I heard it
was either sheep or deer which stood in the
way of the plough.

Yet even shepherds — and most of the men
I talked with were shepherds or stockmen —
realised the importance of bread before mutton.
They did not eat the mutton they helped to
raise. "This parkland," asserted one shepherd to
me, " would produce better crops than the
land broken up on the top of Bury Hill."
Certainly the land to the north of the park is
poor, but this park is so large that something
more than 47 acres should have been scheduled
for ploughing.

Arundel Park, which consists of 1425 acres,
was a more difficult problem than any of the
other parks I visited. Here, again, deer formed
the chief difficulty. (This obstacle, by the way,
to improved cultivation had been unnecessarily
strengthened by a stupid letter sent out by the
Food Control Department. The Duke of
Beaufort produced this letter as the counter-
stroke when he was asked to break up more land

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 53

in his deer park simultaneously with the Food
Control Department's request that he would
keep up his head of deer !)

It is true that deer had been killed in every
one of these parks. Indeed, on the morning
that I walked over Arundel, twelve had been
shot ; but the herds might very well have been
considerably reduced in size, killing off more of
the bucks. Deer should only have been kept
where the land was too poor for sheep.

For the most part there is but a thin layer
of soil on the chalk of Arundel Park ; but
even here I found indications of certain fields
inside the park having been ploughed many
years ago. On a treeless slope stretching to the
south, and known as Copy Hold Brow, and in
Rutting Hill Bottom, the "bores" — infallible
evidence left by the plough — are still visible.
This slope may not be suitable for the tractor,
and I do not say that even if ploughed by
horse teams, impoverished as it has been by
deer, the land would produce great crops. It
has been shown, however, that by the applica-
tion of artificials, the herbage, at any rate on
chalk, can be improved. Better land for tractor
ploughing could be found adjoining the Wood
Barn, and the old fatting paddocks for bucks.

The powerful arm of feudalism was not by
any means confined to keeping the parks of
the old aristocracy inviolate from the desecrat-
ing touch of the plough. Parks at the foot of

54 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

the Downs, such as that at Lavington (which
is railed in by a fence painted black and white,
as a tribute, no doubt, by the owner to his
famous whisky), were allowed also to remain
undisturbed.

A few weeks after my visit to West Sussex,
at a time when every cottager was exhorted
to grow vegetables, and every town dweller
to grow mustard and cress in his window-
boxes, I received an S.O.S. message from an
old naval officer who resided close to the gates
of Lord Pirrie's magnificent park at Witley,
in Surrey. "The men want allotments," this
message ran; "but I cannot get them. Can
you help ? "

My friend had, with characteristic bulldog
pertinacity, appealed to the Food Production
Department ; to the County Agricultural Com-
mittee ; he had bearded the officials at the
Board of Agriculture ; he had even button-
holed his friend, Lord Rhondda, the Food
Controller, after lunch at the Reform Club.
His lordship urged him to "stick to his guns,"
for he had a strong case. But though he held
on tight, not a rod of land would Lord Pirrie
cede inside his spacious park.

The village of Brook lies in a sleepy hollow
on the edge of the great park. On the hill
dominating it stands the agent's house, placed,
no doubt, so that from this coign of vantage
the wants of the villagers should immediately

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 55

come under the agent's notice and be immedi-
ately communicated to his lord. Unfortunately,
however, through some oversight, or through
the wrong filling in of forms by uneducated
men, or through not memorialising the author-
ities and the Tite Barnacles in the proper way,
the eager desire for allotments, expressed as
far back as the previous October, had not been
granted. This was all the more extraordinary,
for immediately one left the village and took
the road to Thursley nothing but acres and
acres of undulating grass land and woods were
visible.

On one side of the narrow lane, over-arched
by a bridge, which supports a private four-
mile motor track that takes Lord Pirrie into
Haslemere without having to touch the vulgar
high road, the grass land was occupied by
deer, pheasants, and rabbits, and on the other
side by picturesque West Highland cattle, and
again by pheasants and rabbits. A small piece
of cultivated land was visible which, during
our tragic struggle for bread, had been cropped
with buckwheat and lupin, for pheasants must
have grain, though peasants may lack bread.
This park consisted of about 2500 acres inter-
spersed with woods.

Seven men, who did not live in Lord Pirrie's
cottages, were bold enough to ask to be
allowed to cultivate a quarter of an acre of
this uncultivated land each. Two of these

56 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

men had no gardens ; and the others, who had,
found them periodically flooded, in consequence
of a defective culvert, by a brook. The men
patriotically proposed to dig the land after
labouring all day for employers. They said
they would dig it by moonlight if they were
given access to it, and they had the effrontery
to select for their labours a very suitable piece
of under-grazed land which was inside the park
fence close to their cottages. So enraged were
they with the rebuffs they received that they
actually proposed to take the land by force
under the leadership of the naval officer. But
the land, he said, was not his fighting element,
and he wae getting too old for that sort of
thing. The men were eager to put up pig-
sties, for millions of acorns are shed from the
oaks in the park in the autumn, and they could
get manure from the army camps near by at
3s. yd. a load. But the agent stated that he
did not like the site these men had selected,
because of the number of pheasants from the
park which would consume the smallholders'
crops ! A strange objection to advance in
war-time, when agricultural committees had
the power to appoint warreners to enter any
private property and destroy the pests. And
this objection was, to my amazement, upheld
by the Land Commissioner. Lord Pirrie was
a great man. Was he not confidential adviser
to the Cabinet ? Had he not built a house for

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 57

the curate? Though no unsightly pigsties
disfigured the cottage gardens of lodge-keepers
and carters on this tidy feudal estate, did not
my lord keep a model piggery, in which pigs
with high pedigrees had the satisfaction of
looking out of glazed windows over an ex-
tensive estate unspoiled by the sight of plebeian
pigsties ? Although no unsightly fowl-house
disfigured the cottage gardens of lodge-keepers
and gardeners, did not my lord show how hens
should be kept on a model poultry farm ? — and,
on the estates of big game preservers, poultry
runs in war-time had to be extended.

It is true that in the days of Mr. Whittaker
Wright the park contained 5 farms, and
19 plough-teams used to be employed in
producing corn at Winkford, Wareham,
Grayswood, Blowhead Green, and Birtly
Farms. But farm buildings are apt to become
an eyesore on a tidied-up feudal estate. When
they do, they should be levelled to the ground !

It is true that some of this land once grew
6 quarters of wheat to the acre ; but the
County Agricultural Committee had reported
that it was not worth ploughing. Therefore,
was his lordship to blame ?

However, after a long struggle, the men did
get a few rods for allotments, though they
were on a patch of land subject to periodical
floodings and outside the park fence. Never-
theless, they valiantly dug up their little patches

58 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

by moonlight, and the County Agricultural
Committee did eventually order 230 acres to
be ploughed ; but you cannot expect patriotic
plutocrats busy building ships to have time to
attend to Cultivation Orders ; and what is a
fine of ^50, which he had to pay for neglect-
ing to carry out the Orders, to a man of Lord
Pirrie's wealth ? He still remains in possession
of an estate from which he has erased 5
farms. After all, was he not a benefactor to
his poorer brethren ? Did he not build a
house for the curate ?

Those who care to plough through the
minutes and evidence of the Royal Commission
on Agriculture, evidence given entirely by
farmers, will find sufficient proof, without my
stressing the point, that a great deal of the
land of England and Scotland, even at a time
when Agricultural Executive Committees were
in full swing, and Inspectors and Land Com-
missioners were swarming over the countryside,
was being ill-cultivated. The reason given
naturally varied. Some alleged that it was
due to the sporting proclivities of the owners ;
some that it was owing to the impoverishment
of the landowners, who could no longer repair
buildings, gates, fences ; some put it down to
the defective arterial drainage ; and so on, and
so forth. Whatever the reason adduced, the
fact remains that private enterprise working
under inspectorship, as when working uncon-

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 59

trolled, failed to cultivate the land as it should
be cultivated.

A manager of a farm of 3000 acres in the
heart of Northamptonshire, a farm which is
described as a rabbit warren when he took it
over, with trees growing through the roofs
of cottages, was bold enough to state in his
evidence in chief that one of the reasons for
ill-cultivation was "the ultra-conservatism and
lack of adaptability of the majority of the
farming community." This evidence was pre-
sented by one who had some hard things to
say about " Labour," which, after examination,
he generously retracted. We had evidence
that good farmers refused to take farms in
parts of certain counties where the owners
were known to be great sportsmen.

Not all farmers are averse to game. It is
not the game-preserving landowner who is the
enemy of good cultivation only, or he who
hires the shooting. The sporting tenant-
farmer can make himself as great a nuisance,
if he holds the sporting rights, and Ground
Game Acts, and Agricultural Holdings Acts,
though they read very nicely in print, are in
actual practice no aids to good cultivation.
Compensation for damage done by pheasants
is very rarely insisted upon, and to be at liberty
to shoot ground game is no protection for the
farmer. The good farmer will not spend his
time with his hand upon the trigger. The

60 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

only effectual remedy is to have the legal
power to destroy the rabbits in their warren,
which often lies just outside the reach of his
hand. There are farmers — not good farmers,
for the true craftsmen of the fields have too
much pride in their work to take farms overrun
with rabbits — who are not averse to rabbits
running over their ground, and spoiling their
meagre crops. I heard a farmer who rented
under a duke, boasting, even in war-time, that
he could pay his rent out of the rabbits he
snared and shot. Why should he trouble to
put his hand to the plough ?

Perhaps the most damaging indictment
against sporting landowners came from the
Scottish farmers, than whom there is no finer
class of farmers in the world. Before the War
we had watched with apprehension the growth
of the deer forests spreading over the farm
areas with its sinister swelling as of a dark
cloud. Before the Selborne Committee, Sir
Robert Wright reported : " In 1883 there were
1,710,000 acres of land devoted exclusively to
deer forests and sport apart from grazing in the
crofting counties of Scotland. In 191 2 this
area had increased to 2,932,000 acres. Out-
side the crofting counties there are 668,000
acres, making a total in 191 2 of 3,600,000
acres." The witness gave an instance of a
small settlement of 1500 acres in the centre
of the deer forest area, where some of the lower

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 61

ground is used for arable farming, and a sheep
stock is kept on the higher ground. The
annual sale from the produce of stock and
crops give about ^250 at normal prices, while
on the same area under deer (4 stags and 2
hinds) the food value is estimated at only ^20.
Following this evidence, given in 19 16, we
get some remarkable testimony from Mr. R.
MacDiarmid, Corries, Loch Awe, Argyllshire,
tendered before the Royal Commission in
January 1920. Mr. MacDiarmid wrote, in a
letter presented by the chairman of the
National Farmers' Union of Scotland : " A
very large area of land within the surrounding
district in which I live is taken up with deer
forests. It includes the Blackmount Deer
Forest, extending to at least 50,000 acres.
Confining my remarks to land which has been
cleared of sheep within the last twenty-five years,
I find that in one parish alone 8 farms lying
adjacent have been cleared of sheep. These
8 farms collectively carried a mixed black-
faced stock of 20,000 sheep. Some years
ago a portion of one farm was restocked
with 2000 sheep, while in 191 7 the District
Agricultural Committee insisted on the shoot-
ing tenant restocking with 1000 sheep a
farm he had two years previously cleared, so
that the number of sheep displaced by deer
is now reduced to 18,000. The bulk of all
this land is sound sheep-grazing, does not

62 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

readily storm in winter, and very rarely, if
ever, have sheep been hand-fed there. . . .
I have further a wide knowledge of similar
lands cleared of stock in Argyllshire, Perth-
shire, and Inverness-shire, a great part of which
is adapted to sheep-farming. ... It is very
unfair that sheep are fenced off from deer
forests while the deer range all over the sheep
land, destroying and eating up the best of the
grass. I know deer forests where, in a storm,
not one deer remains in the forest ; they are
all down on the sheep land, where every knoll
cleared of snow is covered with them. I
challenge issue with parties who maintain that
deer will live on high land where sheep are
unable to make a living. If deer were strictly
confined to the Highlands there would soon
be an end of them."

It appears from the above that an owner,
even in war-time, would displace sheep for deer,
and an Agricultural Committee could effect
but very little change in the displacement.

We have on record that whereas during the
few years prior to the War our agricultural
population decreased by 16 per cent., game-
keepers increased by 25 per cent., and although
during the War a certain number of game-
keepers were turned into soldiers, whilst others
joined the volunteers, or looked after poultry,
it seems, judging by the amount of game pre-
serving going on to-day, by the size of

NOBLESSE OBLIGE 63

shooting parties, by the eviction of small
farmers from their holdings to make room for
gamekeepers, or for sporting farmers sub-
servient to game preservers, that we are
rapidly slipping back, in spite of County
Agricultural Committees, to pre-war con-
ditions.

CHAPTER IV
THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES

IN spite of the earthworks thrown up by the
lords of the soil, the defenders of private
property, great and small, against the
demands of the nation for food, a revolution
(spell it with a small r, please Mr. Printer, or
people may see Red) was working its way into
the heart of rural England in the years 1917—
19. But if any one thinks this was due to
the guaranteed prices being assured for wheat
and oats, he will make a very great mistake.
Farmers with wheat guaranteed at 60s. in 19 17,
dropping to 45s. a quarter in 1920, displayed
as much heart in ploughing grass land as might
be found in a bolting cabbage. It was under
the crack of the carter's whip of that forward
person, Mistress D.O.R.A., that farmers pulled
at the plough as they never pulled before.
Examining witness after witness at the Royal
Commission on Agriculture we found that
few farmers could honestly reply that the
guaranteed prices had had any effect in stimu-
lating wheat production. The whip, indeed,

was far more stimulating. As Sir Daniel Hall

64

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 65

graphically said in answer to a question I put
to him, "They have not been in the picture at
all."1

Indeed, owing to the rapidly diminishing
wheat average since 191 8, I should say that
the guaranteed prices have had a contrary
effect, causing farmers to fear a low price.
And if any one thinks that the guaranteed price
of 68s. per qr. (rising and falling according
to costs), as incorporated in the Agriculture
Act, 1920, is going to turn a single furrow
lying dormant, hidden from the fructifying
touch of the sun, the frost, the rain, and the
wind, to form seed pasturage for corn, he thinks
with his head in the clouds, where it should be,
but his feet do not, as they should, make con-
tact with Mother Earth. The price embodied
in the Act does not profess to leave a profit,
but only to ensure the farmer against serious
loss. Is any one therefore going to believe

1 Mr. Green (Q. 20) : " Do you think that the guaranteed
prices as a policy have really stimulated corn production in
this country?" Ans. : "Certainly not. . . ." Q. 221:
" Therefore they have been quite ineffective ? " Ans. : " They
have not been in the picture at all."

Mr. J. M. Henderson (Q. 128): "The result of the Corn
Production Act has been to increase the cereal area of how
much?" Ans. : " I do not think the Corn Production Act has
had any effect in that direction." And, again, Ans. to Q. 223 :
"The area under the plough has been increased by nearly
2,000,000 acres ; but I would not put that down to the Corn
Production Act, but to the much more drastic action of the
War Executive Committee." {Minutes of Evidence, Royal Com-
mission on Agriculture, 1919-)

66 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

that a single farmer filled with the desire for
gain will sow more wheat because he is ensured
against either a serious loss, or even against a
little loss ? He will withhold his hand from
sowing any particular crop if he sees nothing
but loss in front of him, however trifling the
loss may be. Farming may be a healthy way
of earning his living, but the farmer is not out
for the sake of his health. The world's prices
may stimulate farmers to bring second-rate
land under the plough for wheat, but the Act
certainly will not.

11 Individually, I do not want a guarantee,"
said Mr. J. M. Gardiner, M.P., a Scotch
tenant-farmer, to the House of Commons,
when the Agriculture Bill was under discussion.
11 1 am going to say to this House that if there
is a farmer, who knows his business, who does
not admit that during the past few years he
has been making a profit, then either his
veracity is not altogether accurate, or he is a
very poor farmer."

" In my firm opinion," said Mr. Cautley,
K.C., M.P., " not a single acre of land will be
brought under cultivation as it (the Bill) now
stands. On the contrary, it will not even stop
the diminution of arable land that is now going
on in this country." Such was the considered
opinion of an ardent advocate of guaranteed
prices.

Why, then, did the farmers sign the Majority

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 67

Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture,
recommending these guaranteed prices ? They
signed, not because they cared two pins about
the costing figures presented to them, for which
no one had a tittle of respect, but because
"guarantees" stood as the declared policy of
the Prime Minister, and they saw a prospect
now of the bigger carrot of the world's market
being held in front of them. Thus guaranteed
prices were inserted in the Bill with compensa-
tion for the disturbance of good tenants, together
with the assurance of the world's market prices
for all corn grown in 192 1. Furthermore, and
this is a point I want my readers to note,
farmers knew that if they behaved themselves
with that political subservience which our
country's dictators have exacted from their
supporters, they would no longer feel the crack
of D.O.R.A.'s whip across their bent shoulders.

Since 19 19, our wheat area in England and
Wales alone has diminished by 347,561 acres,
the yield by 1,300,000 qrs. — the smallest yield
per acre since 1904 — and since 19 18 the yield
has dropped by 3,853,000 qrs.

It has been proclaimed from many a barn
roof that the diminution was due to the pressure
of high wages. Now the wages of farm
labourers in Great Britain have never had
any relation to the price of corn ; neither in the
Golden Era of the Sixties, when wages were
very low, nor in the depression of the Eighties

68 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

and Nineties, when wheat dropped in 1896 to
its lowest recorded price of 22s. iod. per qr.
Indeed, in that year, wages were higher than
they were in the glorious Sixties ! Ours is
largely a milk and meat producing country,
and the producers of milk and meat, as well as
the producers of barley, poultry, eggs, fruit,
and vegetables have had to pay the same
wages as the producers of wheat and oats.

So little has been the connection between a
statutory minimum wage and guaranteed prices,
that in the Agricultural Bills presented by
both Conservative and Labour members, in
the House of Commons in 19 13, there is no
mention of guaranteed prices ; nor are there
any prices guaranteed to-day to those manu-
facturers in some forty different industries who
have to pay the legal minimum wage under the
Trade Boards Act.

Wages rose, it is true, but so did the prices
of farm produce.

Let us look at a few figures.

The spurt in wheat production took place in
the winter of 19 17-18. It was in the autumn
of 191 8 when many a stubble field began to go
back to grass.

The average wage, including all allowances,
in England, in 1913, was 17s. 9d. The minimum
wage, including all allowances, in October
191 8, in twenty-four counties of England and
Wales, was only 30s. Hours certainly were

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 69

shorter than in 19 13, but as we have no
authentic figures as to hours worked in that
year, I cannot make any accurate comparisons.
We can, however, deduce from the foregoing
figures that wages had barely doubled. Now
let us compare the rise in value of farm pro-
duce, taking June 19 13 to May 1914 as one
period, and June 19 18 to October 19 18 as
the other.

Fat cattle rose from 8s. 2d. per stone to
1 6s. yd. ; fat sheep from 8|d. per lb. to is. 3^d. ;
fat pigs from 8s. id. per stone to 19s. yd. ; wheat
from 31s. 9d. per qr. to £3, 13s. 6d. ; barley
from £1, 6s. yd. to £2, 19s. yd.', oats from 18s. 8d.
to £2, 9s. 5d. ; beans from £1, 14s. 5d. per
532 lb. to £10, os. iod. ; peas from £iy 16s. 9d.
per 504 lb. to £9, 8s. 5d. ; potatoes from £3, 4s.
per ton to £6, 13s. ; milk rose from 9d. per
gallon to is. 8Jd. The General Index number
of vegetables rose from 100 to 284, and of fruit
from 100 to 383. We see from these figures
that during this period prices were not only
doubled, but even trebled.

What, then, made the farmers take their hand
off the plough for the production of wheat ?
They did not take their hand off the plough
which prepared the ground for barley. That
crop has increased in one year (1919-20) by
127,450 acres. Why? Because for barley
they had a free and uncontrolled market.
They were out for profit and, uncertain as to

•jo A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

the price to be fixed for wheat, they naturally
produced what paid them best.

After the Armistice, resting from their patri-
otic labours, they farmed, not to meet national
needs, but, like most business men, for private
gain. As Cultivation Orders ceased to be issued
to plough up grass land, many a field which
might have grown wheat was ploughed for
barley, for which brewers were offering ioos.
per qr., or was sown with grass seed.

A cleverly written paper presented before the
Royal Commission on Agriculture, by the
National Farmers' Union — which was probably
written in the office of the Institute for Research
in Agricultural Economics in Oxford — spoke
learnedly of the Law of Diminishing Returns.
The Law of Diminishing Returns, forsooth !
when we were steadily losing our place as the
premier country in the world for wheat pro-
duction per acre ; when Denmark was yielding
47 '5 bushels per acre; the Netherlands 37*2
bushels; and Great Britain only 28*5 bushels per
acre ; and when in a county familiar to me the
production to-day is only 3 qrs. per acre, exactly
the same as Arthur Young reported it to be
1 40 years ago ! And as to wages, how
was it that in 19 19 enterprising Scotch farmers
in Forfar could pay their ploughmen £$ a
week, plus allowances — equivalent in all to
£190 a. year — and yet stand the pressure of £3
an acre for rent, whilst English farm workers

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 71

were grudgingly paid 36s. 6d. a week, including
all allowances ?

I do not wish to stress the fact of barley
having a free market ; barley, relatively speak-
ing, was a small matter. The reasons were
psychological rather than physical. After the
signing of the Armistice the farmers sulked,
and not only sulked, but were possessed by the
feeling of insecurity, both as to the tenuous hold
they had on the land with their annual leases,
and as to the fear of falling prices. They
naturally resented American farmers being paid
any price from 100s. to 150s. per qr., whilst
English farmers were only allowed 75s. per
qr. Farms were being sold over the heads of
the tenants — and, in spite of Mr. Cautley's little
Bill, continued to be sold — until in some
counties, in 19 19, half the land was said to
have changed owners. There was the fear,
too, fanned by official prophets like Sir
James Wilson, that the price of wheat would
fall to a low figure. Not realising the mili-
tarist ambitions of the Government bent on
adventures in Russia and Mesopotamia, and
with imaginations fed by stories of granaries
bursting with grain on the seaboard of the
Argentine prairies, on the quays of Odessa,
waiting for the opening of the golden gates of
Constantinople, and of the luxuriant crops
growing on the fertile plains watered by the
Euphrates and the Tigris, farmers undoubtedly

72 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

feared that the figure of 45s. was put into
the Corn Production Act not without some
sound prophetic reckoning.

The farmers pursued a policy of which they
have often accused trade unionists. They
pursued a policy of "ca'canny." They took
concerted action, and their Union carried out
a very successful campaign. They were de-
termined to get their price, to get a free, un-
controlled market for all farm produce. They
were the County Agricultural Executive Com-
mittees. Except in a few very flagrant cases,
they no longer feared the frown of D.O.R.A.
She had been packed off to Ireland to find out
if peasants were cultivating the political policies
pleasing to the Government, and farmers hence-
forth decided to be very kind to one another.
Eventually, but too late, the Government offered
to raise the maximum price for wheat from 75s.
to 95s. per qr. It should have made this
known in October 19 18, instead of late in the
summer of 19 19. It was a blunder which lost
the nation many a quarter of wheat, although
Mr. Lloyd George had told the farmers that
they had been the most patriotic class.

There were physical reasons, too, why some
of the land which had been ploughed for wheat
had returned to grass. Many acres of grass
land were torn up which should have been left
in grass, and the herbage improved by the
application of basic slag and other fertilisers.

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED TRICES 73

In many instances this would have paid us better
nationally, for it is better to leave good pasture
ground untouched by the plough than to get a
crop of docks, thistles, and couch-grass follow-
ing wheat ; and this is what happened on many
a small farm where the occupier had neither the
implements nor the horses for carrying on
cultivation after the Government tractor had
vanished from the scene. Far better would it
have been to have concentrated upon arable
farms where there were available tackle and
horses, making the land which had produced but
3 qrs. to the acre produce 4 or 5 qrs. On certain
arable farms, especially in Scotland, which will
not yield more than 3 qrs. of wheat to the acre,
but will yield 9 qrs. of oats, and 10 tons of
potatoes, it was folly to grow wheat instead of
oats or potatoes.

I have known small farmers, on stiff, four-
horse land, who had Cultivation Orders served
on them when they have been destitute of a
single carthorse on their small grass farms.
To-day some of these fields are a pathetic
sight. The cows have gone because there was
no hay for winter fodder, and milk has become
a scarcer commodity than ever. It is true
that a greater herd of cattle can be kept on
ploughed land than on grass, but it requires
strength — horse and manual — to carry out a
programme of continuous cropping, and where
capital and labour are lacking, that admirable

74 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

policy is not possible. Ploughed grass fields,
which lay open between coverts to the de-
predations of game and rabbits, soon lapsed
back to grass when pheasants and rabbits
were left to multiply in their preserves or
warrens.

Another reason, supported by eminent author-
ities examined before the Royal Commission,
was that some County Committees followed
too much on the lines of every man being made
"to do his bit," regardless of whether that bit
was of any use to us nationally or not. In
some districts it would have been far better
to have pursued a policy of improving the
pasture, as at Poverty Bottom, in Sussex, and
adding to the meat reserves of the nation
rather than of increasing the acreage of badly
cultivated arable fields.

On many a pasture ploughed for wheat or
oats, the much-dreaded wireworm, instead of
being conquered by a succession of cultivations,
unfortunately has been left in possession of the
field. Nevertheless, these ill-cultivated fields
have revealed to us many of the seams to be
found in the patched-up garment of private
enterprise, a garment which is very little im-
proved by being "inspected," and is turning
a seedy green.

Now I want to turn to the production of
milk, which, to us, in times of peace at any
rate, is of more importance even than the

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 75

production of corn. I do not wish to set up a
discussion as to the rival merits of wheat and
milk policies, for it is more or less common
knowledge that under tillage we could keep —
as they do in Denmark — a greater number of
cows than we can on grass. There was, how-
ever, a tendency to reduce herds of cows during
war-time under our plough-policy, and this was
due to one or two reasons.

The cow-keeping, grass farmer had, to a
large extent, lost the skill which may have
been possessed by his father or grandfather
in tillage operations. He often had neither
the implements nor the horses necessary for
continuous cultivation. He looked upon the
plough-policy as a kind of panic legislation
which would cease when the War ceased.
He had an eye always on sowing grass
across the upspringing corn. Farm buildings
were often insufficient or unsuitable for the
keeping of horned cattle and horses at one
and the same time, and certainly to increase
the number of his cows was an impracticable
proposition where buildings were altogether
inadequate.

We have known what it is to suffer from
a shortage of milk, due amongst other causes
to a curtailment of imported linseed and cotton,
and we may suffer again. In fact, the poor
are suffering from an insufficient supply of milk
at a price within their means. There is not

7 6 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

only a question of insufficiency, but there is, in
addition, the question of cleanliness. It has
been stated that 10 per cent, of our cows are
tubercular. I should put the proportion much
higher, and it should be borne in mind that the
milk from tubercular udders gets mixed with
other milk, thereby increasing the quantity
that is tainted. It is not only milk from
tubercular cows which endangers the health
of the community, but also milk which is
tainted by the unclean hands of milkmen, and
by the hairs and worse solid substances which
drop from the hides of cows, into milk pails.
Those of us who have bent our necks under
the dirty flanks of cows, and have had our
faces lashed by the ends of tails saturated in
urine, can speak from unpleasant personal ex-
periences.

It is here where farming by inspectorship
breaks down most completely, and if we have
a case for nationalisation of agriculture in the
matter of the production of corn, we have an
overwhelming case in the production and dis-
tribution of milk. Cowsheds are supposed to be
inspected ; but I wonder how many ever receive
even an occasional visit from an inspector? In
my limited experience I have known several that
have never been inspected at all. And what
is more, how many inspectors visit the cow-
sheds at milking-time ? Milking processes on
farms are enough to make the most hide-bound

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 77

individualist who consumes milk demand im-
mediate public control over the production as
well as over the distribution of milk.

Private enterprise does not safeguard us
against the delivery at our homes of filthy
milk, nor does it safeguard us against a milk
famine. There is no law at the present day
to prevent the loss of some of our finest young
cows owing to the practice of dairymen in
urban areas drying off their cows, and[fattening
them for the butcher. It is the practice of
some town dairymen never to send their cows
to the bull ; and one may depend upon it that
they only buy the very finest freshly calved
cows they can get at the market.

Private enterprise thinks naturally only of
personal gain, and some dairymen seem to find
this the most profitable way of managing their
business. It was not, I think, until 1912,
when I had a long conversation with Mr.
Runciman, that England began to think of
emulating Austria- Hungary and Ireland by
supplying first-class sires to farmers. As late
as 1 91 7 it was pointed out before the Selborne
Committee " that the number of bulls subsidised
under the Scheme — i.e. 675 — was very small
compared with the very large number of bulls
in the country," and, further, "the experience
gained by the Board in the administration of
Calf Orders clearly proved that the use of
unsuitable bulls was very common among

78 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

milk-selling dairy farmers, and the result
was that calves sired by such bulls were
difficult to dispose of, or were quite unfit for
rearing."

It is the practice of milk-selling farmers
to sell their calves soon after they are born,
at the nearest market. If we nationalised
milk production, it is evident that we should
keep all calves fit for rearing for two or
three weeks, until they could stand long
journeys with impunity on their way to rearing
farms.

Much milk under private enterprise is wasted
every year, especially in the summer, owing to
the difficulties of transport, the absence of
cooling stations, clean churns, and efficient
organisation. Much milk is returned as sour,
and some is thrown to the pigs. New milk,
which should be reserved for human consump-
tion, is often used for fattening and rearing
calves (when these after three or four weeks
might very well be reared on cream equivalents).
A properly organised system of collection and
delivery, and the establishment of cooling
stations where water is laid on, would save us
nationally many thousands of gallons of milk.
Moreover, there is many a remote, fertile
valley in this country, divided by undergrazed
hills, which might be exploited for milk pro-
duction had we a national scheme of production,
transport, and marketing. The recently issued

THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 79

Report stating that heifers and cows have
during last year decreased by 200,000 shows
that if milk production is left to private enter-
prise we might easily be faced with something
approaching a famine in milk.

CHAPTER V
THE AGRICULTURE ACT AND ITS FUTILITIES

SUPPORTERS of the present Government
will no doubt argue that provision has
recently been made, by the setting up
of County Agricultural Committees under the
Ministry of Agriculture Act, 19 19, and by the
extension of powers granted these newly formed
bodies under the Agriculture Act, 1920, to close
up the gaps left in our national agricultural
policy by uncontrolled private enterprise.
They will argue that most of the abuses from
which we now suffer will surely be eradicated
by these Committees, which have the enormous
powers of administering the Small Holdings
and Allotments Acts, the Diseases of Animals
Acts, the Destructive Insects and Pests Acts,
the Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs Act, Part
I. of the Land Drainage Act, 19 18, the Rats
and Mice (Destruction) Act, Part IV. of the
Corn Production Act, 1917, as eviscerated by
the Agriculture Act, 1920, and Part II. of the
Land Drainage Act, 19 18. In addition, these
Committees are charged with fostering rural

industries — whatever these may be. They will

80

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 81

also become responsible for the work of the
existing County Live Stock and Horse- Breed-
ing Committees. If directed by the County
Council, and subject to approval by the Board
of Education and the Ministry of Agriculture,
they may take over the provision and admin-
istration of Agricultural Education.

Formidable as that list reads on paper, a
review of it evokes feelings similar to those
expressed by Frederick the Great, when,
having surveyed the serried ranks of a raw
army, he exclaimed, " I don't know what effect
they will have on the enemy, but they terrify
me ! " The grounds for this pessimistic out-
look are twofold : the composition of the
Committees and the vague, non-compulsory,
and timorous nature of the legislation enumer-
ated above.

Firstly, then, let us examine the statutory
composition of the Agricultural Committees.
They are established under Section 7 of the
Ministry of Agriculture Act, 19 19. This clause
instructs County Councils to appoint an
Agricultural Committee, and directs that a
majority of the Committee shall consist of
persons appointed by the Council, although
such persons need not of necessity be members
of the Council. The Ministry of Agriculture
may appoint not more than one-third of the
members, and also appoints a similar proportion
of members of any Sub-Committee enjoying
6

82 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

the exercise of delegated powers. Women
must be included in the membership. An
extremely important subsection is worded
thus: "Every scheme shall provide ... for
the appointment ... of such persons only
as have practical, commercial, technical, or
scientific knowledge of Agriculture or an
interest in Agricultural Land."

In practice the County Councils have elected
a majority of the Committees from their own
membership, and have added a sufficient
number of outsiders to bring this nucleus up
to two-thirds of the total membership. The
Ministry has then added the full third to which
they are entitled as a maximum under the Act.

One county, that may be taken as typical,
framed its scheme to give a Committee con-
sisting of nineteen members of the County
Council (of whom three had to be the chair-
man and vice-chairman of the County
Council, and the chairman of that august body's
still more august Finance Committee), five
members nominated to the County Council by
interests for appointment, and twelve nominated
by the Ministry. The scheme for this particular
county boldly embodies the above-quoted
clause of the Act requiring all these members
to have practical or other active knowledge of
agriculture ; but it does not need a very vivid
imagination to conjure up circumstances under
which that County Council of ninety members

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 83

might be unable to furnish nineteen trained
agriculturists. Are we to understand that only
truly rural minds will henceforth be eligible to
fill the chairmanship, the vice-chairmanship,
and the chairmanship of the Finance Com-
mittee, of that particular County Council? If
one could be sure that even County Councils
always observed the laws they administer, the
affirmative would be the only possible answer.
As a matter of fact, the enforcement of this
particular regulation has already brought the
Ministry into conflict with some of the County
Councils, and it is not always the agricultural
interest that has emerged successfully from the
contest. It would be interesting to examine
the agricultural credentials of some of the
members of the Committee on which I serve,
especially the claims to a seat of a war-time
knight, who at the first meeting tried to stultify
the work of the new organisation by describing
a county that has more agricultural land than
either Huntingdonshire or the County of
Holland in Lincolnshire as "non-agricultural."
Inasmuch as these Agricultural Committees
are Committees of County Councils, they
become subject to the financial control of the
County Council Finance Committee, although
very little of their cost is chargeable to County
Funds. The services administered by the
Agricultural Committees can be divided into
three groups financially.

84 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

In the first place are certain minor services
coming under the Diseases of Animals Acts,
the Fertilisers and Feeding Stuffs Act, and
the Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act, which
have to be defrayed, without subvention from
Government funds, from the County General
Purposes Rate.

Then comes the administration of the Small
Holdings and Allotments Acts, the whole cost
of which until 31st March 1926 will be borne
by the Treasury. After that date the small
holdings estate will revert at a valuation to
the County Council. Thirdly, there are the
powers hitherto exercised by the Agricultural
Executive Committees and the Land Drainage
Committees. The whole cost of these services
will fall on the Ministry, and, even after the
mystic septennial period beyond which im-
perial responsibility for small holdings ex-
penditure is not to go, taxes and not county
rates will bear these burdens.

The proportion of the total expenditure of
the Agricultural Committees on each of these
three groups will roughly be 3 per cent, on
the first or purely County Council charges,
42 per cent, on the second group, for which
the Ministry will remain entirely responsible
until 1926, and 55 per cent, on the third
group, for which the Ministry are responsible
for all time. This analysis (which, while it
may differ slightly in different areas, is, within

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 85

very narrow limits of variation, accurate for
the whole country) shows that even if after
1926 the Ministry succeeds in pushing financial
responsibility for small holdings back on to
the shoulders of the county ratepayers, more
money will have to be found from imperial
than local sources for the financing of Agricul-
tural Committees.

Although for the present the County Council
has to find only about 3 per cent, of the
Agricultural Committee's total expenditure,
the whole of the Agricultural Committee's
accounts have to be included in the County
Budget. This brings them within the control
established by Section 80 of the Local Govern-
ment Act of 1888, which enacts that no
expenditure of over £50 shall be incurred
except upon a resolution of the Council passed
on an estimate submitted by the Finance Com-
mittee. A more flagrant example of the tail
wagging the dog it would be hard to conceive.
Although the county rates will find one-
thirtieth of the expenditure, the County
Finance Committee will have absolute control
over the policy of the Agricultural Committee.
I understand that some obstinate County
Councils have (louted the Ministry of Agricul-
ture Act in its demand for Agricultural Com-
mittees composed only of agriculturists ; but
the most perfectly constituted Committee will
be under the control of the dominating and

86 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

close-fisted Finance Committee, without whose
express recommendation not even the most
sympathetic of County Councils can come to
the assistance of a vigorous Agricultural
Committee.

Even where an Agricultural Committee
consists only of bona-fide agriculturists it by
no means follows that even a reasonably
strong minority of the Finance Committee
will have practical knowledge of the land.
The ruling spirits of the County Councils have
carefully preserved, in their own hands, the
great power Section 80 of the Act of 1888
gives them, so that the temporary aberration
of a Committee desiring to follow an enlightened
policy may be checked without the incon-
venience of a public discussion.

In England, though not in Scotland, the
County Councils are thoroughly reactionary
in outlook. The great majority of the seats
are never contested. Few men with active,
progressive, enthusiastic minds can afford the
time or the money entailed in attendance at
meetings held in the daytime at a distant
county town. The effect of the legislation
of the twentieth century has been to overload
the County Councils with important social
work with which the members have no
sympathy. It is difficult to imagine a body
less fitted to deal with the present parlous
condition of farming under private enterprise

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 87

than the County Councils controlled by the
secret juntas of their Finance Committees,
upon which any one but the up-to-date agricul-
turist is invested with power. As for the farm
worker, why, the mere suggestion that he should
be considered in connection with either finance
or policy would bring down the grey hairs of
the county aldermen in terror to the grave.

While this wonderful Act was in its birth-
throes we were assured that ample provision
would be made for the inclusion of farm
workers in the personnel of the Committees.
If the County Councils failed to appoint them
they would be nominated by the Ministry.
In reply to the perfectly obvious argument
that no labourer would be able regularly to
attend at his own expense a Committee meeting-
many miles from his home, with frequently
long and circuitous journeys to be undertaken,
the Act of 1 9 19 declared that :

"Any scheme under this section may pro-
vide for the payment as part of the expenses
of the Agricultural Committee of travelling
expenses and subsistence allowance of members
of the Committee or of any Sub-Committee of
the Committee."

"There, you see," I was assured, "how
really democratic the Government is at heart."
What, however, is the practical effect of this ?
The Ministry appointed me to an Agricultural
Committee. At its first meeting I looked

88 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

round for the one skilled farm worker whom
I knew had been appointed. He was not
there ; he has not yet put in an appearance !
The reason can be discovered without putting
a Sherlock Holmes upon the track. The
County Council, consisting mainly of rich men,
considered it gross extravagance to pay "sub-
sistence allowance." This was coolly cut out of
the scheme, which the Ministry of Agriculture,
without demur on this point, approved. When
I protested to the Ministry, the official answer
was that the clause was "permissive." On
another County Agricultural Committee the
one farm worker who was appointed, and who
managed to attend because his Union paid his
expenses, was immediately discharged by his
employer !

It would be interesting to probe the strength
of this contention that the use of the word
"may" limits the compulsion of the Act, for in
another connection the Solicitor-General told
the House of Commons during 1920 that the
Government regarded " may " in such measures
as being equivalent to " shall." The attitude of
that little-known but very powerful body, the
County Councils Association, is deserving of
note. It shows the attitude of mind adopted
towards this crucial matter by those who set the
pace for the County Councils. The Gloucester-
shire County Council passed a resolution in
the following terms :

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 89

" That the Ministry of Agriculture be asked
to take the necessary steps to enable payment
to be made, when claimed, to members of the
Agricultural Committee of compensation for
loss of remunerative time, as in the opinion
of the Council the absence of such payment
may prevent the acceptance of office by certain
persons who would be useful members, or may
cause hardship to those who accept and under-
take the work."

This was a highly sensible resolution if the
County Councils desired to bring into their
deliberations the best available agricultural
talents. The Association decided that no
action should be taken. When, however, the
Ministry in February 1920 wrote to the auth-
orities outlining the place the Agricultural
Committees should hold in County Govern-
ment, and the status to be given to the staff,
the Association, in the sacred cause of autonomy
for reaction, resolved "to protest against any
unnecessary interference with the prerogatives
of County Councils in regard to the appoint-
ment and duties of their own officials." This
claim of independence from Ministerial advice
and control was doubtless meant to be im-
pressively dignified ; in view of the fact that
it is another statement of the claim of the
3 per cent, tail to wag the 97 per cent, dog,
it must come near to holding the record for
impudence.

90 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

It will be seen from these criticisms that the
Agricultural Committees are constituted and
controlled in a manner not likely to give
grounds for hope to those who desire a pro-
gressive national policy in agriculture. When,
however, we come to our second point, the
powers with which they are invested, it is
doubtful if the best imaginable committees
could justify their existences. The Agriculture
Act has been called the Farmers' Charter.
Ostensibly it was designed to stimulate food
production, as it carries with it such of the
miserable remnants of the Corn Production
Act (Part IV.) as could be rescued from the
destructive hands of the Lords. For the life
of me, I cannot see that it will produce any
other crop than lawyers' fees. Whilst the
stinging whip of Madam D.O.R.A., 2 m., is
broken, it is not replaced even by that lady's
hatpin as a goad in the Committees' hands.
The guarantees will certainly not stimulate the
production of a single additional quarter of
wheat. Even the good cultivation clauses of
Part IV. have been eviscerated. Although
private enterprise has failed to deliver the goods,
and although farming by inspectorship can
make little better claim, all that an Agricultural
Committee can insist on, in a vague sort of
way, is a standard of good husbandry, which I
am afraid will probably consist of cutting down
docks and thistles and cleaning out ditches.

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 91

The supporters of the Agriculture Bill,
anxious to persuade the truculent Lords that
this miserable measure was not really as black
as it had been painted, prefaced the copy sub-
mitted to the Upper House with a memorandum
containing the following paragraph :

"The provisions of S. 9 of the Act of 19 17,
which deal with the enforcement of proper
cultivation, are re-enacted with substantial
modifications and amendments by Clause 4.
The principal amendments are as follows :

" (a) It is proposed that orders for a change
of cultivation shall only be made when
the production of food can, in the
national interest, be thereby main-
tained or increased without injuriously
affecting the persons interested in the
land, and a right of appeal to an
arbitrator is provided to determine
whether the order is properly made.
Such an order may not interfere with
the discretion of the occupier as to the
crops to be grown"

What fertile fields for litigation are prepared
by those passages that I have taken the liberty
of italicising ! For the next generation the
lawyers will arise and call this Act blessed, for
the Lords were not appeased. Even the weak
proposals of the Government were still further
robbed of strength.

92 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

The ordinary citizen may not care whether
the farmer or the labourer has security of
tenure or not. He may care less whether the
workers' minimum wages are to have permanent
statutory sanction ; but what he must care
about is the enforcement of the rules of good
husbandry on the limited soil of his island
home.

The official spokesmen for the Government
had one powerful argument in defence of
the Bill. They said that if the community
guaranteed prices, the community then had
the right to compel good cultivation. That
argument has now been destroyed. The Lords
saw to it that the community did not come
into the picture at all, unless dressed as a scare-
crow ; and the Commons humbly bowed their
acquiescence.

As far as the farmers are concerned it is not
security of tenure they get, but compensation
for disturbance, and even this has been modified
by the House of Landlords leaving the gate
wide open for lawyers to enter. Few legis-
lators cared publicly (though some of them
have been fined as transgressors under the
19 1 7 Act) to deny the labourer a statutory
living wage. The Agricultural Wages Board
is to remain ; but the Lords seized the oppor-
tunity in an attempt to keep the farm-tied
labourer a serf. Not that the Government
had shown any eagerness to free him, for there

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 93

would have been no security for him at all had
it not been for the intervention of the Labour
Party ; and the security is not worthy of the
name. Indeed, to keep a roof over his head
he is likely to be involved in much litigation.

If a farmer or landowner takes the precaution
to give his workman, as a mere matter of form,
notice to quit, though he may have no intention
of executing it, during the first six weeks of his
occupancy, the labourer gets no compensation.
Nor does he if the District Wages Committee
consider that the cottage is needed in the
interest of food production. He does not get
any compensation if he occupies a cottage
(as most hinds and shepherds do in the North
of England, and practically all ploughmen in
Scotland) taken with the usual six-monthly or
yearly agreement.

One would have thought that these provisions
left the labourer in a position of insecurity to
satisfy even the most feudal-minded person.
But no! On the birthday of Him who was
born in a manger, and had not where to lay
His head, the Lords, on going home to their
stately mansions for the Christmas festivities,
decided, by a destructive amendment, to make
it almost as difficult for the son of man who
watches over his flocks in the twentieth
century to keep a roof over his head. How-
ever, I am glad to learn that the Labour
Members in the House of Commons fought

94 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

so hard that the Lords, weakened by fatigue
from an all-night sitting, graciously allowed
the measure to pass.

A landowner like Captain Fitzroy, M.P.,
need not fear that the beneficent beams of
land nationalisation are to be discovered in
the barren pages of this Act. Whilst money
is to be spent on agriculture, and land values
are to be improved, the nation is to have no
permanent hold over the land. The farmer
who does not practise good husbandry may
have his lease determined, though he occupies
no other house and no other land ; but the
mansion, the park, and even the home farm
of the great landowner who ill-cultivates his
land, are to be inviolate from invasion. The
War was not fought in vain ; the private parks
are to be made safe from democracy.

The great landowners in the Cabinet have
been victorious. So carefully has the Act been
drafted to safeguard their sacred rights that,
even where the County Agricultural Committee
finds an estate mismanaged, after it has brought
the land into good heart, it is to hand back as
quickly as possible the estate to the original
owner. The Committee cannot sell it without
his sanction, nor can it, apparently, acquire it
on any terms for the nation. And, mark you
this, sporting rights are to be particularly
protected in the interests of the owner !

Hunting is in vogue once more. Foxes

THE AGRICULTURE ACT 95

are daily being bred to be killed. Those
who follow the hounds are covering nearly
the entire map of England with a network of
hunting areas, leaving few gaps between them.
At the sound of the hunter's horn, at any
moment, forty horsemen may come plunging
across your fields, churning up the sodden
pastures, crushing the tender-leaved clover
under their ruthless hoofs, charging into the
upspringing winter oats, and trampling into
rain-holes the seedling wheat. And the Hunt
pays the damage, say you ? What if it does :
the nation suffers in loss of production.

In spite of all the evidence brought forward
by farmers at the Royal Commission on Agri-
culture, not a single provision is made in the
interest of good cultivation to abolish, or even
to reform, the Game Laws.

To promote food production, the Agriculture
Act, 1920, is the most fatuous Act ever re-
corded in our statute books.

CHAPTER VI

HOW AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES SHOULD

BE FORMED

CERTAIN conclusions might, I think,
fairly be arrived at from the foregoing
chapters : That a great deal of the land
of Great Britain is mismanaged and ill-culti-
vated ; that as dwellers in a thickly-populated
island, living within a very limited area of
agricultural land, we cannot afford to leave
the land ill-cultivated ; that War revealed to
us that private enterprise could not be trusted
to meet the national needs ; and that farming
by inspectorship has failed, and will fail, to get
the land properly cultivated. Private enter-
prise has broken down, and private enterprise
supervised by inspectors is also breaking down.
I go further and say, as the majority of the
farmers say, that farming by inspectorship is
intolerable, and is bound to break down. The
Welsh member who declared in the House of
Commons that he would rather have the whole
hog of nationalisation than farming by inspector-
ship, spoke sound common sense ; and if any

96

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 97

one doubts whether farmers have a liking for
any form of control, either in prices or by in-
spectorship, a visit to an assembly of farmers
discussing their own affairs will soon cure him
of any illusions on this subject. When the
Prime Minister made his famous speech to
farmers at the Caxton Hall in 19 19, the state-
ments which evoked the highest enthusiasm
were those which hinted at decontrol and the
desire on the part of farmers to be let alone to
manage their own affairs. Yet it is into the
hands of these very farmers who are clamouring
for decontrol, who are letting land go back to
grass, who are avowedly treating the land not
in a way to ensure its greatest productivity, but
to reap the greatest profit — to these very men,
aided by colleagues who are non-agriculturists
sitting on County Councils, that the Govern-
ment has entrusted the enforcement of the rules
of good husbandry and the provision of small
holdings for both ex-soldiers and civilians.

No one was more conscious than Mr. Lloyd
George himself that he was playing to the
gallery — his gallery at his Caxton Hall matinee
being packed with landowners and farmers —
when he said that landowners and farmers had
displayed a splendid patriotism in the War ;
just as Mr. Lloyd George was conscious of
playing to the gallery — his gallery then con-
sisting of labourers — at the entertaining nights
at Bedford and elsewhere during the great

98 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

land campaign in favour of a minimum wage
for labourers.

If any one thinks I show bias in my strictures
on farmers, as a class unaccustomed to think of
the commonweal in the pursuit of their trade,
I would refer him to other authorities. Sir
Daniel Hall, who has been accustomed to mix
with farmers, to hear their views, and to inspect
their holdings, wrote in his book, Agriculture
after the War: "His (the farmer's) personal profit
does not coincide with the national interest,
either in the direction of the production of food,
or in the maintenance of men upon the land."
They are no worse in this respect than any
other class of business men, and one should not
expect from them a higher standard of patriot-
ism than that maintained by any other class of
men engaged in prosecuting their business for
personal gain.

Nor should we blame them, for Burke, the
great British opponent of the French Revolution
and the Defender of Profiteers, when we were
at war with France and food was scarce, said :
"But if the farmer is excessively avaricious?
Why, so much the better — the more he desires
to increase his prices, the more interested is
he in the good condition of those upon whose
labour his gains must principally depend."
The farmer at that time of war prices was so
interested in the good "of those upon whose
labour his gain must principally depend," that

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 99

he paid them 6s. or 8s. a week. Ever since
then farmers have been brought up on the
gospel of Burke. As Cobbett pungently put
it : "It was only for the sake of the poor naked
devils of labourers. . . . This was the only
reason for their wanting corn to sell at a high
price !

That which farmers might do in 19 19, if they
did not get their price, was very frankly dis-
played in the most important document which
the National Farmers' Union officially presented
to the Royal Commission on Agriculture. I
will quote from this document two illuminating
paragraphs.

"That which some men did in England
during the depression, that which men have
always done in the new countries, can be done
by men generally in this country if the market
drives them to it. They can cut down their
fences and lay fields together for mechanical
cultivation in large areas ; they can reduce
their labour bill while paying high wages at
the same time to the men retained ; they can
cut down their expenditure on manures applied
and cultivations done to increase the fertility of
the soil, and at the end of it all, with reduced
productivity, and costs even more reduced, they
can make their farming (or ranching) pay.
Going a stage further, they can lay large areas
of the less fertile arable lands down to grass,
and in the last resort they can, if necessary, lay

ioo A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

the whole country down to grass, and English
agriculture can become once more a primitive
pastoral industry.

11 All this can be done, step by step, as
necessity dictates, but it is important to re-
member that it will not bring disaster either
to the farmer or to the worker. Farming can
be carried on profitably even under the extreme
conditions imagined above, and labour can be
paid high wages at the same time. But it
must be borne very seriously in mind that in
proportion as market conditions force this
policy upon the controllers of the industry, so
will production and employment be reduced.
Every successive change in the downward
direction will reduce the output of wealth from
the soil, and will reduce the number of the
rural population. Some of them, both farmers
and workers, will be crowded out, but it will
not bring ruin to the farmers nor destitution to
the farm workers that remain."1

It must be borne in mind that this manifesto
was presented to us as late as the 23rd Sept-
ember 1 9 19, and the gentleman who had to
defend it was a member of a County Council,
and the chairman of its Small Holdings Com-
mittee. I state this without casting the slightest
reflection upon him individually, or impugning
his public spirit. The document only shows

1 Minutes of Evidence, Royal Commission on Agriculture,
vol. iii.

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 101

what farmers feel they still can do, if they
choose, in spite of the existence of Agricultural
Committees.

To put into practice any kind of agricultural
policy it is quite obvious you must have
agriculturists working the machinery. How-
ever much they may dislike Cultivation Orders
imposed upon them, we must have some farmers
to direct the administrative machine ; but the
initial error which the Government made was
to set up County Agricultural Committees, the
majority on which are elected by the County
Councils who may possibly not contain a single
agriculturist, and of appointing the remaining
third chiefly from a class requiring supervision
as to the management of their own farms. As
a class farmers are incorrigible law-breakers.
During the War it was impossible to impose
upon them, or to expect them to abide by, any
kind of ration scheme with regard to meat,
milk, butter, or even bread. To live in a
farmhouse meant, comparatively speaking, to
live well ; and since the fixing of statutory
minimum wages for farm workers every County
Court and bench of Magistrates has had to
try innumerable cases of non-payment of the
legal wage, to say nothing of the greater
number of offences in this respect which have
never come into Court, but which have been
settled between farmers and the officials of the
farm workers' unions.

102 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

Nevertheless, there are good farmers and
public-spirited farmers, and it is essential that
these should take part in the control of this
industry in shaping any national agricultural
policy. But they should only form a section.
From the national standpoint, the most im-
portant class to hold the reins to speed the
plough are the farm workers. These, and
the farmers, should sit in equal numbers both
on County Agricultural Committees and on
the National Council of Agriculture, whilst the
remaining third should consist of agricultural
economists, agricultural chemists, accountants,
engineers, and transport officers.

The most important class to hold the reins
are the farm workers, for there are three farm
workers to one farmer. I have roughly
sketched the emergence of Hodge from the
humble position of a private soldier in the
army of agriculturists, often enlisted by the
recruiting sergeant Hunger, living merely to
obey orders and to have no voice in the con-
duct of his industry. War, the debating
societies of the trenches, the appraisement of
his value at tribunals, education in trade union-
ism, have entirely altered the mentality of the
submissive labourer. He demands a higher
standard of life ; he asks that the treasure
houses of the earth shall be thrown open to
him and to his children. He is, in fact, be-
ginning to demand the land which he has

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 103

defended with his life, and a control of the
industry in which he invests his life.

Those who sow the grain are demanding
more of life than bread, and sleep, and the
grave of a pauper. Scorched by the fiery
furnace of War they have glimpsed a Vision,
and now they are laboriously putting together
and applying to life the letters they learned at
the village school. On the tiny shelf which
holds the cottager's library, other books begin
to appear besides those the children bring home
from Sunday school, and in one of them is
written, " They have leisure and fine houses ;
we have pain and labour, the wind and rain
in the fields, and yet it is of our toil that these
men hold their estates."

They who cut down the willow and shape it
demand the leisure to swing the bat and smite
the flying ball. They who strip the skin from
off the backs of dead beasts demand the leisure
to kick the inflated leathern ball. And she
who has had to live her life confined within
walls, as she watches the clean serenity of the
sky, demands something more than hideously
stained paper to cover her damp walls, and
something more attuned to the singing of the
nightingale than the howl of the wind through
the crack which blows out the light of the
candle.

You cannot pour the new wine of 1920 into
the old bottle of 1914. That bottle has been

104 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

badly cracked in the five years of warfare, and
some other vessel will have to be devised
to take the strong new vintage crushed out
of the tragic winepresses of Europe. The
hierarchy of landlord and farmer over the
labourer has been broken, and if the relation-
ship has not been openly disavowed it is not
because love has held together the sleeping
partner, the managing director, and the servant ;
it is because the new deed of settlement has
not yet been drawn up. Whilst there are
three landless men to one man with land, there
is sure to be a fermentation which will leave a
bitter taste in the mouth.

The landlord, tempted by high prices, and
driven by the fear of a war-legacy of high
taxes, has been slipping out of the partner-
ship quickly. On many estates he refuses to
function even as repairing builder, and has
become a mere rent-receiver. The farmer
has jumped into his saddle. He is now the
booted and spurred, whilst the ploughman still
"homeward plods his weary way." Taking
his chances of a new heaven, thinking his
lean person will squeeze through the needle's
eye with greater ease than his employer whose
wider girth is adorned with an embarrassment
of riches, he is looking for the new earth.

The Government, with its bandage partly
drawn aside from its eyes, has, it is true, an
inkling of this, and triumphantly points to a

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 105

corner of Yorkshire, a spot in Lincolnshire,
one or two other Arcadias, as well as to the
County Council small holdings. Yet these
self-governing little colonies are but backwaters
in the great stream of agricultural life. This
glimpse is as if one were looking at life through
the leper's squint.

It will be noticed that I am giving no place
to the landowner, qua landowner, on either the
County Committee or the National Council.
This is not due to any prejudice I may be
supposed to possess against landowners. As a
fellow-citizen, I prefer landowners to farmers,
for they are better educated, have wider cul-
ture, and are more catholic in their tastes. They
are broader minded with regard both to religion
and politics ; but, unfortunately, as Mr. F. D.
Acland, a landowner himself, says, there are
very few of his own class who put in eight,
or even six hours a day, at the business of
managing an estate in the same way as a
manufacturer has to do in supervising his
works.

At first I was inclined to imitate the constitu-
tion of Lord Selborne's short-lived National
Agricultural Council, on which I sat as a
member, and make the controllers of the agri-
cultural industry consist of landowners, farmers,
and farm workers, but drastic changes in land
ownership have taken place since 19 18, and the
farmer in many counties is indistinguishable from

106 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

the owner. Besides, in any national scheme of
reconstruction, eventually the public ownership
of all land is inevitable. Thus the State will
become the owner, and the two classes that we
shall have to deal with in large numbers on the
land in the immediate future will be farmers
who are still tenants, or bailiffs, managing for
Committees, or the State, and workers who will
be copartners.

For, after all, there is no reason why agri-
culture should not adopt the principle laid down
by Lord Robert Cecil when he spoke about
the present industrial unrest. "The real solu-
tion," he said, "is to give every one concerned
a direct share in the profits, in the management,
and in the capital of each business." Indeed,
we have already begun to make a start in this
direction by the farm settlements at Patrington
and elsewhere. But I am running too far
forward in my subject.

We must get our Board of Management
clearly defined, and give reasons for the consti-
tution and for the personnel of the administrative
bodies.

Under the Corn Production Act farmers and
workers were allowed to choose their own
representatives to sit on the Agricultural Wages
Board, whilst the Board of Agriculture appointed
the remainder. A similar method, with modi-
fications, might be followed in forming Agri-
cultural County Committees. The third

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 107

consisting of farmers should be left to a selec-
tion in England by the National Farmers'
Union, and by one or two cognate bodies of
employers, such as nurserymen and dairymen ;
and the workers' representatives should be
chosen by the National Union of Agricultural
Workers and the Workers' Union. The
National Farmers' Union is entirely representa-
tive of the farmers of England, for I believe
that nearly 90 per cent, are now members
of the Union, and the two workers' unions
are representative of the majority of the
labourers.

In Scotland the National Farmers' Union
of Scotland should select the farmers, and the
Scottish Farm Servants' Union the workers.
The remaining third, in both England and
Scotland, should be chosen by the public, that
is, by a House of Commons' Committee on
Agriculture. A reasonable payment should be
made in equal sums to all members in these
Committees. The ridiculous variations in pay-
ment made to workers, farmers, and appointed
members sitting upon the Agricultural Boards
and the District Wages Committees should not
be tolerated. Every member should be paid
equally for services rendered to the community.

Though I would exclude landowners as
landowners, there would be nothing to prevent
those possessing sufficient brains from playing
an important part in the control of the agri-

108 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

cultural industry, as farm managers, or agri-
cultural economists, or accountants, or in any
other expert capacity, if either the farmers, the
farm workers, or the Minister of Agriculture
chose to appoint them. Personally, I should
be very sorry to see the County Executive
Committees of Devon, Lincolnshire, Norfolk,
Staffordshire, Somersetshire, Hampshire, and
Essex without the services, for instance, of
landowners who are serious agriculturists, such
as Mr. Acland, Mr. Christopher Turnor, Sir
Ailwyn Fellowes, Mr. Buchanan, Lord Bledisloe,
Lord Selborne, and the Hon. E. H. Strutt.

That a third of County Agricultural Com-
mittees should consist of farmers I think will
be agreed by all classes. The real innovation
is the proposal that a third should consist of
farm workers. The argument that there are
farm workers already appointed to those agri-
cultural committees may be brushed on one
side by pointing to the fact that it is only in
one county — Norfolk — where there is the
amazing number of six or seven agricultural
labourers sitting on the Committee. This has
been due largely to the fact that the well-
organised union there, the National Union of
Agricultural Workers, has had the common-
sense to finance the County Council candida-
ture of several of its members.

Though the Minister of Agriculture, under
Section 7 of the Ministry of Agriculture and

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 109

Fisheries Act, 19 19, can appoint quite a
number of farm workers as persons who " have
practical, commercial, technical, or scientific
knowledge of agriculture," as members of
County Committees, in actual practice he does
not do so. Nor has he, in certain counties,
even insisted upon, as I have already said, the
payment of subsistence allowance. To wait
for the process of getting a large number of
skilled farm workers elected to County Councils,
and thereby on to Agricultural Committees, is
much too slow to contemplate, while election ex-
penses have to be paid for by poor men, and loss
of time attending County Councils to be suffered.

Number of Labour County Councillors.

Bedfordshire

7

Bucks

2

Cornwall .

2

Cumberland

8

Derbyshire

6

Dorsetshire

2

Durham

57

Essex

4

Gloucestershire .

10

Hants

5

Hertfordshire .

1

Isle of Ely.

9

Isle of Wight

2

Kent .

1

Lancashire

6

Lines.

3

Middlesex .

2

Monmouth

38 !

Norfolk .

• 6 1

Northants .

7

Northumberlanc

I

. 8

Nottinghamshire

. ,

1

1

1

Soke of Peterborough

6

Somerset .

.

3

Suffolk (East) .

. ,

4

Surrey

.

1

Sussex (West)

•

. 1

Warwickshire

,

1

Wilts .

Worcestershire

.

. 1

Yorkshire ("North Riding)

• 9

Yorkshire (West

Riding)

•3o

Anglesey .

• 3

Brecknockshire .

,

7

Carmarthen

. 2

Carnarvon .

,

. 1

Flintshire .

. 10

< Glamorgan

.

8

Montgomery

.

• 3

Pembrokeshire .

.

; 6

no A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

If any one doubt this, let him glance at a list
of Labour County Councillors completed on the
ist January 192 1. (See p. 109.)

The only Councils which show anything like
an adequate representation of Labour, outside
the West Riding of Yorkshire, are the mining
counties of Durham and Monmouth. It is
impossible to say how many of these Labour
Councillors are farm workers ; but outside of
Norfolk I believe there are extremely few.
Labour does not yet seem awake to the import-
ance of capturing seats in the County Councils,
in spite of the fact that County Councils are
playing an ever-increasing part in the life of
the nation.

Before the happy consummation of farm
workers, sitting as County Council members,
can be reached, I am afraid hundreds of
thousands of acres of arable land will be drift-
ing back to grass, and rabbit warrens and
pheasantries will be on the increase.

It is of paramount importance to the com-
munity, from the point of view of stimulating
food production, to get skilled farm workers
appointed on the County Committees. It is
in the interest both of those who invest their
lives in agriculture as well as in the interests of
those who eat the bread they produce. Farmers
are said to be discharging many of their men
during this winter, and no exhortations, even
such as Lord Lee delivered at Leicester in

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES in

October, will prevent them from doing so.
What he said then was rather a sinister portent
of the times. "There is," he remarked, "a
certain amount of unrest amongst agricultural
labourers at the present time, owing to rumours
of discharges on a large scale, due to the re-
duction of the arable area. I am not willing to
believe that there is very much in that, although
in some cases there may be. There are some
farmers who are affected by panic, and who
think, on account of the higher wages, their
only safety is to put more of their land down to
grass. If there is any deliberate movement
of that kind, there could be nothing more
dangerous or fatal to the agricultural industry.
It would create an army of landless men, men
who understand work on the land, and who
would make an irresistible demand, with justice
behind them, to have that land broken up and
given to them to deal with as small holders.
If farmers were led into that mistake, they
would be simply cutting their own throats and
destroying their own position. I trust the new
County Agricultural Committees will exercise a
very firm hand in the matter. . . . The great
danger to-day is that there is so much mutual
distrust and misunderstanding that rash steps
are taken which are very often irrevocable.
After all, all sections of the agricultural com-
munity must work and stick together, because
no one can settle their differences except them-

112 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

selves. The Government cannot do it ; cer-
tainly the Ministry of Agriculture cannot do

it."

And yet Lord Lee expects a Committee
largely representative of a class that is letting
the land down to grass, to prevent this process
of deterioration in agriculture and the increase
of unemployment !

While the workers themselves do not control
the means of production, in spite of an Agri-
cultural Wages Board, they cannot ensure
employment, and farmers have the whip hand
of them, as they frankly pointed out in the
manifesto I quoted, issued by their Union.
The only real remedy for unemployment, and
for the under-cultivation of the land, is to make
the farm labourers themselves copartners in
their own industry, and the initial step in this
direction is to give them proportionate repre-
sentation on County Agricultural Committees.
The most acute critics of bad farming are not to
be found within the superb masonry which graces
Whitehall, but inside the tap-room of the Pig
and Whistle, or the village institute where the
trade union branch meets.

Many of these men are unknown beyond the
adjoining parishes. Their names never appear
in the printed sheet. They never step out into
the limelight. Their lives are spent in lonely
watches, on the slopes of the Downs with their
dog and sheep as companions, or in tending

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 113

bullocks in yards, and yet many an English
flock master has earned an international reputa-
tion through the skill of his head shepherd, and
many an English breeder of Shorthorns owes
his fame to the patience and the eye for points
of some stockman whose genius has benefited
the whole nation. They are often men of few
words —

" For words are but under-agents in their soul ;
When they are grasping with their greatest strength
They do not breathe among them."

Nationally we make poor use of the skill of
these men. I have known farm labourers of
great intelligence who have married young, and
becoming fettered by a large family, reared on
low wages, have had to remain wage-slaves all
their lives in positions which have never given
them scope for their striking abilities. The first
rung- on the ladder — the small holding; — has been
denied them through the lack of capital — the
poverty that has always dogged their heels.
And these are the men we ought to be utilising
nationally.

If we only had a system of measuring in-
telligence, such as the Americans instituted
when they passed men into their army, I wonder
what we should discover ? We suffer the
squire to remain in power as a destructive
economic force if he chooses to be a bad land-
lord or employs a bad agent. Even if he be an
8

H4 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

absentee landlord spending in riotous living, in
foreign cities, the money earned by the sweat
of other men's brows, he has still the power to
reduce the fertility of our land and to increase
unemployment. If the farmer be stupid or
lethargic, so long as he pays his way, he can
still remain squatting on ill-cultivated acres.
But if the labourer proves his inefficiency he
instantly gets a week's notice, and loses, often
enough, not only his job but his home. A
great deal of weeding out has been performed
by employers since the minimum wage became
statutory. It should not be very difficult, now
that workers have come to know one another's
capacities better through the formation of trade
unions, to select men of exceptional ability.

As I look out of the window my glance falls
upon a cottage roof which shelters a farm worker
who, to my knowledge, has not only ploughed,
sowed, and reaped corn for his employer,
thatched the farm ricks, painted wagons which
have won prizes, and broken in the colts, but
has killed his neighbours pigs for them, doctored
their sick cows, clipped their horses, cleaned
out and repaired their wells, mowed their
orchard grass with a scythe, planted fruit trees,
and driven bees into empty skeps. He has a
knowledge of wild life which would make many
a sportsman envious ; and with his strong, deft
hand he has led to market many an untamed
heifer which had never been haltered. I have

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 115

watched him fell with an axe a tree as thick as
a stout farmer, and split it into roughly hewn
posts. He even repairs the roof of the cottage
he rents, as I am afraid many a labourer has
to do if he wishes to sleep in a dry bed.

I remember one day in war-time pointing
out to him some uncultivated fields on the
Weald clay overrun with rabbits. I asked him
if he thought a certain field worth cultivating.
"Why not?" he answered quickly. " There
is no bad land, if you treat it properly, and
that land used to grow five quarters of wheat
an acre."

I have heard of there being no bad beer —
except one summer when a farmer was mean
enough to water his harvest beer — but never
before have I heard there is no bad land. Yet
allowing for poetical licence there is a good
deal in what my friend said. Astonishing
results have been achieved, not only by the
Belgians in reclaiming the sand, but also by
Dr. Edwards at Methwold in reclaiming heath-
land ; and no one, perhaps, would have dreamed
what could have been done on the chalk Downs
until Mr. Passmore waved his magic wand.

Yet there is no opportunity, as things stand
at present, for the skilled worker I have de-
scribed above to exercise his wide experience,
knowledge, and skill beyond the few acres over
which he drives his plough.

I am fully aware of the defects in the training

n6 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

and outlook of the farm worker. Twenty years
ago the idea that farm workers might become
bailiffs on estates, or become partners in a guild
of agriculture, would have been scouted, not
without reason, as visionary. I am not one of
those who considers that all the virtues of man-
kind are contained in corduroys, nor all its weak-
nesses in broadcloth. The average farm
worker, intellectually, labours under the same
difficulties as the small farmer. He is in-
dividualistic. Like the small farmer, he is a
dealer by instinct, which militates against his
working for the common good. His geography
is bounded by the environs of the nearest
market town. He is intolerant of innovation.
He is suspicious of any one devoting himself
to social service, outside the narrow circle of
charitable works. His education is deficient,
and he is just as conservative as the small
farmer in experimenting with artificial manures
unless the fertiliser has an offensive smell.

But the cataclysm of war has effected great
changes in the mentality of the younger farm
labourers. The bicycle did something to widen
their horizon, but, unfortunately, the bicycle
tended to take the young men away from the
country. War brought the young farm worker
into touch with the mentally alert workers of
the towns ; and taught him to see the effective-
ness of scientific organisation of machinery and
labour. It brought the tractor on to the

AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEES 117

untilled fields, and the motor lorry into the
lanes. More important still, it converted the
farm worker to trade unionism. Attendance
at trade union branches and Wages Committees
has trained him to express himself in speech
in a manner which would have been impossible
in the days of Joseph Arch. Then the
labourer's vocabulary was said to be limited to
five hundred words, and over 80 per cent, of
farm workers were unable to read.

Across the table at District Wages Com-
mittees Hodge has had to look at farming from a
wider point of view than that of wages and hours.
On Agricultural Committees he has had to
consider national interests as paramount, and
although he owns scarcely a rood of it there is
no greater lover of the land than the farm
labourer, and no one who resents more it being
butchered and made waste. His knowledge of
the fields would be more intimate than that of
the farmers, his criticisms more searching, and
he would be less susceptible than the farmer
to the subtle influence of social pressure. The
tractor-ploughman, the man who is engineer
as well as husbandman, has now made his
appearance in the countryside, and it is from
men of this type we may expect to see an
increase of administrative ability amongst the
farm workers. What I have said of the young
farm worker who has seen during the War
different methods of cultivation in foreign

1 1 8 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

lands, and the advantages of collective organi-
sation, is true also of the young farmer, who
has worn khaki, and been overseas. His mind
should be more elastic than his father's.
With the labourer he will know what it is
to render social service without thought of
private gain.

CHAPTER VII
A NATIONAL COUNCIL OF AGRICULTURE

IN planning an agricultural policy for Great
Britain I have started, as we have seen,
from the farm itself, enlisting the services
of the farmer, and the farm worker, with the
agricultural economist, accountant, education-
ist, engineer, or transport officer as copartner.
The unit of administration may be a county or
part of a county or counties, according to
physical difficulties or facilities. In certain
districts which may embody several counties
we may find it more convenient to take an
extensive drainage area, following the course
of a river from its source to its estuary. That
is a matter of administrative detail. The com-
position of the Committee is the most important
factor in production.

The work of these Committees must be co-
ordinated, and a National Council of Agriculture
formed, largely of representatives of County
Committees, somewhat similar to the one already
instituted under the Ministry of Agriculture
Act, 1 9 19.

A National Council is necessary to direct on

119

120 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

national lines those services for the efficient
conduct of which the county as a unit is too
small, such as agricultural education, transport,
afforestation, the reclamation of waste land,
electric power, the distribution of coal and oil,
as well as of farm produce, the provision of
market places, the importation and milling
of wheat, the manufacture and purchase of
machinery, feeding stuffs and fertilisers, which
may become not only national, but international,
services. There are also the discovery and
selection of new seeds, of new methods of
dealing with diseases, and of new implements,
to be taken into account, for undoubtedly we
shall in time have our national agricultural
laboratories and engineering works. Prices
will have to be fixed nationally.

Such an agricultural super-body would be
essential in order to be in close touch with the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, hot only to exer-
cise control over services fundamentally national,
but also to direct the cultural policy. For
instance, whilst a vigorous plough policy is
absolutely essential, both for the production of
more milk and meat, as well as for bread, it
may be wise, on information received at head-
quarters on the estimated yield of the world's
harvests and the demand of other nations, to
grow less wheat, and more oats and barley, or
vice versa. It may be, too, a more economic
policy at times to extend arable dairying at the

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF AGRICULTURE 1 2 1

expense of the wheat acreage. That is to say,
it may be advisable, on national grounds, for
the production of more milk, to grow more
green crops, peas, beans, cabbage, mangolds,
swedes, tares, annual leas of grass and clover,
and so lessen the importation of expensive
linseed and cotton cake. Oats, too, form an
important crop in arable dairying, but the
policy of continuous cropping for milk and
meat will be largely dictated by climatic con-
ditions— Scotland, Wales, and Ireland being
climatically more favourable than the eastern
counties of England to this method of cultiva-
into. It may, too, be sound national policy to
encourage the cultivation of sugar-beet. In
any case we should keep land under the plough,
and, being permanently equipped with better
buildings, implements, and horses for arable
cultivation, we should be ready for any emer-
gency. Personally, I am convinced that arable
dairying would be more economical — in the best
sense — than an indiscriminate plough policy for
wheat. I am sure it is so for Scotland, where
magnificent crops of oats can be grown in
places where wheat cannot thrive.

To deal with these, and with other matters
cognate to them, it will be necessary to have
a National Council of Agriculture, but this
must be a live body, an assembly not merely
meeting twice a year, with an Advisory Com-
mittee only permitted to make recommendations.

122 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

It must have real powers, and become in fact
the Ministry of Agriculture in place of that
present bureaucratic body, and it should consist
of representatives in equal numbers of the three
classes of agriculturists — the farmer or bailiff,
managing for the community, making one class,
the farm worker another, and the finest of our
agricultural chemists, engineers, and account-
ants forming the remaining class.

Now it is necessary to outline the policy to be
pursued in acquiring land, the size of the holdings,
and the method to be adopted to see that the
worker obtains the full fruits of his labour. In
the acquisition of land at prices which have not
been inflated since the War, the Land Settle-
ment Facilities Act does not help us much.
For every acre of land we purchased, to let to
ex-soldiers or others, we have had to purchase
at the market value, increased by war prices.
The Agriculture Act does not help us in the
least, not even in the State having the power
to take over land where the owner has glaringly
neglected his stewardship. And if the com-
munity has to drain land, to improve it by
better cultivation, to put up new buildings, etc.,
it is obvious that the community will not tolerate
doing this in order to hand it back, in an im-
proved condition, to owners who have either
wilfully neglected the land or have been unable,
through the stress of circumstances, to do their
duty by it.

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF AGRICULTURE 123

Furthermore, as every acre of land we pur-
chase for the settlement of ex-soldiers increases
the value of the agricultural land surrounding
it, if we pursue this policy of purchasing land
at inflated prices we shall be placing a huge
burthen, not only on the backs of the whole
community, but also on that of those who have
fought for the land, when, in March 1926, the
latter are compelled to pay the full market
value of their holdings.

The question of the ownership of the land is
vital, and surely there can be no other event-
uality than that of land nationalisation. Until
that consummation is reached, how are we to
proceed financially ? In a national measure it
would be quite fair, I think, to take Over land
at assessment value, plus, perhaps, an additional
5 per cent, for disturbance. But it would be
obviously unfair to acquire an estate to-morrow
at assessment value from a man who has perhaps
put his whole savings into the land, whilst the
owner of an adjoining estate is left in full
possession of his land and the income he
derives from it. It seems to me that the only
fair way, in the transitional state — the bridge
between now and then — is to institute a land
tax, so that the landowners who are still left in
possession should make the entire contribution
for compensating the difference between the
assessment value and the market value of land
to the owner whose property has been acquired

124 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

by the community. If landowners object to
this plan, which is entirely my own proposition,
there seems to be nothing for it but to bring in
land nationalisation as a universal measure as
speedily as possible.

The purchase of land by annuities is an
alternative policy to the acquisition of land
by means of Land Bonds, and this is being
done to-day by County Agricultural Commit-
tees, with the difference that these annuities
are based on market values. In any national
policy of acquiring land, annuities must be
based on the assessment value. This subject
is fully discussed in Mr. Emil Davies' book,
Land Nationalisation, and is really outside
the scope of my job, which is to outline an
agricultural policy. Land nationalisation, of
course, is an urban as much as a rural problem,
and must embrace the acquisition of the more
valuable golden soil which is paved with
asphalt. Nevertheless, as we are concerned
in this short study with the acquisition as
well as the use of agricultural land, we should
know that the value of this is estimated by
Dr. J. C. Stamp, in his British Incomes and
Property (191 6), at ^1,155,000,000, with a
further ^"250,000,000 to cover the value of
houses and buildings.

Whether we issue Land Bonds or grant
annuities there is no question of raising the
money. Taxpayers will not be called upon to

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF AGRICULTURE 125

find money for land purchase. The interest
on Land Bonds would be paid out of the rents
received from tenant-farmers, occupiers of
country houses, and from rents paid to the
nation by Guilds of Agriculturists working
under County Committees.

At so great a rate would production increase
if land were to be properly cultivated by col-
lective effort, possessing advantages of superior
machinery, brains, and skilled manual labour,
that the interest payable to the holders of
Land Bonds would soon become a mere
bagatelle compared to the wealth obtained
from the soil. A great deal of the agricultural
land in England, owing to bad equipment, to
the gratification of the lust for game, or to
other social reasons, has been let below its
economic value. When nationalised, that land
will become productive of its real economic
value.

Assuming that we have full powers to
dispossess immediately both landowners and
farmers who are not cultivating their land
properly, and to acquire such land at the
assessment value, then we could with a licjht

9 o

heart begin putting the buildings in order, and
such farms would naturally be managed by
County Agricultural Committees, and would
be placed under the care of farm managers
selected for their capacity to farm, whether they
have been farmers or agricultural labourers.

126 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

All farmers who are maintaining a high
standard of cultivation, and all small holders
who cultivate their holdings properly, should
remain in occupation as tenants. Even when
all land is nationalised, it may be in the
interest of the nation to leave such farmers
in occupation as tenants.

Yet as private enterprise has failed us so
lamentably, and as private enterprise, even
when spurred to extra activity in the national
interest under the inspectorship of the friendly
eye of the farming brotherhood, has failed to
keep land from falling out of cultivation, it is
evident that we must pursue a forward policy
of acquiring as much land as possible to be
worked in the interests of the farm workers
and of the community. The community is
not going to be content to take over and
cultivate the worst cultivated land as it did
in war-time. If it can farm with advantage
estates which have been badly managed, it can
farm good land to better advantage.

What we want to do is to make every
worker in the agricultural industry happy, and
to contrive a method of copartnership which
will make him feel a pride in his work so that
he puts his very best self into it. It is quite
natural that under a competitive system, a
system which only develops in man a cunning
of an anti-social kind, that farmers should
resent any form of inspectorship. If a cow is

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF AGRICULTURE i 27

tubercular, let us get rid of it as a magnificent
milker! If a horse kicks like the devil, let
us hide this fact and send it to a sale ! If the
gooseberries are affected with mildew, let us
hope no inspector will visit us ! If a plum-
tree has silver-leaf, let us cut it down and say
nothing about it, and so on.

On the other hand, on a large farm where
all are copartners working in the interest of
the whole community, every effort will be
made to keep up a high standard of pro-
duction ; for it will be in the interest of every-
body to eliminate all the sorry cattle and the
unclean stocks of fruit, to rear the finest live
stock possible, and to possess the cleanest
trees. Just as the workers would be keen to
detect a "rogue" or a "sport" and weed it
out, so they would anticipate with pleasure the
visit of an expert, who came to tell them the
good news of some discovery made in subduing
diseases, of experiments made with better seed,
and to introduce the strain of a higher class of
stock, or some new fertiliser, or leisure-giving
machinery, or to suggest better methods of
transport.

CHAPTER VIII
SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS ?

IN outlining any national agricultural policy
it is essential to consider the sizes of
holdings which can best be worked as
economic units. Most politicians, be they Con-
servative, Liberal, or Labour, have advocated,
or, at any rate, paid lip-service to, the small
holding. The Conservative, with shrewd politi-
cal foresight, has advocated small ownership,
for will not the " magic of property " enthuse
every owner of a cabbage patch to fight to the
last ditch in defence of the rights of private
property ? The Liberal has encouraged, by
legislation, the creation of a class of tenant
small holders. This policy the Labour man
has generally supported, with a vision of land
nationalisation. I have written on the subject
myself, but, from the point of view of a crafts-
man engaged in cultivating a small holding,
and not as the advocate of the creation of a net-
work of small holdings as a national agricultural
policy. The Labour Party, being in the past
an urban party, has never seriously committed

itself to the work of drafting — apart from land

128

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS ? 129

nationalisation — an agricultural policy declaring
definitely in favour of the creation of innumer-
able small holdings, or of large, State-controlled
farms, or of farms worked by guilds of crafts-
men. It is high time that a definite policy
should be outlined by somebody, and I have
had the temerity to attempt to do so in this
little book.

Before discussing small holdings as a national
policy it would be well to present a few facts at
this stage to show how ineffective have been
the attempts of the Coalition Government to
fulfil their election pledges. Every fighting
man, it will be remembered, was promised, if he
proved himself a suitable applicant, a few acres
of the land which he had been defending with
his life. The first provision made was a ludi-
crously meagre one of 6000 acres in England
and Wales, and 2000 acres in Scotland. These
figures were afterwards increased by the facile
method of adding on an o.

Estates purchased under these schemes were
to be managed by the Ministry of Agriculture
as State farms, worked either as small holdings
or as copartnership concerns. It was obvious
that these farms could not settle very many
men. Indeed, in answer to a question put in
the House of Commons on the 20th October
1920, the settlers at that date, after three years
of preparation, were stated to number only 706.
The duty of finding land for ex-soldiers was
9

130 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

eventually given to the County Councils, the
Ministry allocating the sum of ,£16,000,000
for the settlement of ex-soldiers by these
local authorities in England and Wales, and
£"2,750,000 in Scotland. During the years
19 1 8-1 9 this work was undertaken by the
Small Holding Committees of County Councils,
instructions being given to them by the
Government that small holdings must be found
first of all for ex-soldiers before civilians were
considered at all. Now this work has been
transferred to County Agricultural Committees.
But many of these Small Holding Com-
mittees have suddenly discovered that not
only are they unable to provide civilians with
small holdings, but they are not able to fulfil
their promises to ex-soldiers who have already
been approved as applicants. I know of one
county, for instance, which has spent its quota
of £298,000 after making provision for settling
only 187 men, while it had approved of 488 ex-
soldiers. The Government finding itself in a
quandary with regard to its election pledges,
and the County Small Holding Committees
being at the end of their financial resources, the
Cabinet Committee on the subject sanctioned in
November a further £4,000,000 to be placed
at the disposal of county authorities for the
settlement of disabled ex-service men only who
have completed a course of agricultural training
and have shown themselves able to cultivate a

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS? 131

holding properly. In spite of this additional
sum we find that, in answer to a question put by-
Captain Terrell, the parliamentary secretary to
the Minister stated on the 15th November that
the total number of ex-service men who had
applied was 44,229; that 25,038 had been
approved, and about 7700 were awaiting inter-
views as to their qualifications. But the number
of men actually settled was 10,487 only, though
it was estimated that the land required and not
yet let would provide holdings for a further
8000 men. That is to say, in spite of the extra
,£4,000,000 allocated, County Councils would
have to turn down nearly 7000 ex-service men
who had been promised land, to say nothing of
the 7700 awaiting interview !

In working out the figures I find that it is
costing (apart from training) about £60 an acre,
or at the rate of ^882 to settle each man.
Despite compulsory clauses of the Land Settle-
ment Facilities Act, 19 19, landowners seem to
be doing fairly well out of ex-soldiers and the
taxpayers in the country, for in 1914 the
average price of the land purchase was ^32
17s. 4d. an acre, and the average rent of the
land leased £\ 5s. an acre.1

Now, costly as this work has been, owing to
the sums exacted by landowners and building
contractors, let us see what it all amounts to
when we compare the total acreage occupied by

1 Cd. 7851.

132 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

statutory small holders with the total area of
cultivated land in England and Wales.

At the outbreak of war the Treasury refused
to sanction any money being spent by County
Councils for providing small holdings. By the
end of 19 14 — after the Small Holdings Act had
been in force seven years — the area acquired,
or agreed to be acquired, for small holdings
only amounted to 195,498 acres, that is, less
than 1 per cent, of the whole cultivated area.
If you add to this the total number of acres
acquired for, or promised to, ex-soldiers — that
is, 260,553 acres — you get a total acreage of
456,051, which is even now less than 2 per
cent, of the total cultivated area of 26,507,000
of England and Wales.

It is curious that the man who had the
audacity to apply for small holdings was, and is
still, subject to a close examination as to his
fitness to cultivate a few acres of land and the
capital he possessed. (Imagine the extent of
the savings of the agricultural labourer who
earned on an average before the war 17s. 9d.
a week, including all allowances, and the ex-
soldier who had, at the close of the War, his
is. 6d. a day !) And yet the farmer who applies
for the tenancy of many broad acres has rarely
been asked to prove his fitness. On the best-
managed estates, it is true, inquiries are made,
but on how many is the only question put
whether the applicant is a good sportsman or

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS? 133

not ? Yet it is more important to the nation,
judging by the untilled fields that lie around us,
that large farmers, rather than small holders,
should undergo some acid test of examination.

I am quite aware of the fact that in the
statistics presented to us by the Board of Agri-
culture in 191 5, there were more small holdings
in England than large holdings. That is to
say, the figures showed that out of the total
number of agricultural holdings, 66 "33 per cent,
were held in holdings not exceeding 50 acres
in extent, whilst 33*67 per cent, were held in
holdings of above 50 acres in extent. But the
small holdings in total acreage only amounted
to 14-68 per cent, of the whole cultivated area
of England, whilst the larger holdings took up
85*32 per cent, of the whole cultivated area.

These figures relating to small holdings,
whilst useful, are misleading. They do not
enlighten us in the least as to the number of
holdings held purely as accommodation ground,
or of the number which provide an entire living
to the occupiers. In 19 14 only 1 101 were
described as agricultural labourers, which was
32 per cent, of the total number, and of the
3415 persons and seven associations who
applied, only 61 applicants expressed the desire
for the magic of property, or, in other words, to
own their holdings.

The advocates of small ownership are not very
happy in their illustrations. Their favourite

134 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

example is Catshill, in Worcestershire. I visited
this after it had been established nearly twenty
years, and I could not help feeling that some-
how or other the occupying owners felt over-
burthened. In a report issued by a Small
Holding Commissioner we learn that "only
fourteen out of the twenty-seven original pur-
chasers remained in occupation of their holdings,
that at least five holdings had been the subject
of speculative sale, and that, speaking generally,
the cultivation of the holdings is poor, and in
many cases bad." It is only fair to state that
the accuracy of this report has been gravely
questioned by the Rural League.

Nevertheless, this is the best the advocates of
small ownership have to show, and whether the
cultivation is good or bad one cannot set on one
side the knowledge that should these holdings
become the centre of a thriving town the
descendants of the present owners might
degenerate into an idle class, living upon un-
earned increment — persons who might not have
the slightest interest in agriculture.

Another favourite example of small owner-
ship is in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire.
There is nothing new, as at Catshill, about these
holdings. They are as old as English history.
In the "selions"of the Isle is revealed their
ancestry. There in lines graven by the plough
one can trace history back to the days of the
Heptarchy. We seem immediately to step

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS ? 135

back into an old manor, with its unfenced
common fields divided into strips, but the
community of interests, which welded together
the tillers of the soil in the days before the con-
quest, is lacking in this year of grace, 1921.

The selions, or strips of land, are still owned
individually, and these vary from a quarter of
an acre to two acres each. The small holders
cultivate one or more of these selions, and some
of them manage as many as twenty acres in
widely separated strips. It is, of course, a very
uneconomic way of working land, and as far as
I could make out on the occasion of my visit,
despite the success of several small holders, and
the advantages derived from rich alluvial
deposits, the Isle of Axholme was a paradise
for the money-lender, the lawyer, and the
auctioneer.

The descent from these Arcadias of small
owners to the Sweet Auburns of Shipham in
Somersetshire is steep. I do not wish to de-
scribe Shipham as typical, but only to show
how easily under a competitive form of society
a congerie of peasant proprietors can sink into
a rural slum.

Many years ago a lead mine was worked
here by squatters who built their cottages on
what appears to be no-man's-land. It would
be difficult to find a fairer spot in England than
this, where between the escarpments of the
Mendip Hills can be seen the Bristol Channel

1 36 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

glittering in the sun, and beyond, the shadowy
form of the Welsh hills ; and it is here small
ownership has been carried out to an extent
rare in the annals of rural England. In 1841
the population was 707; in 191 1 it was 359.
When I visited the village in 191 2, though
the population had dwindled to one-half, the
cottages were not only legally overcrowded,
but, according to the Medical Officer of Health
for the County, " grossly and immorally over-
crowded." Thirty-three of the sixty cottages
inspected that year were occupied by their
owners. In one cottage three boys and one
girl slept in one room, while the mother and
three children slept in the other. In the bed-
room of another cottage slept two youths aged
sixteen and nineteen, and two girls aged fourteen
and nineteen. And it should be remembered
that most of these bedrooms were so small that
the cubic space allowed for each person was
often far less than that permitted in a common
lodging-house. In one bedroom, with an area
of not more than 700 cubic feet, slept three
persons of two sexes, aged fifteen, twenty, and
twenty-one. In two very small bedrooms of a
capacity of 660 and 480 cubic feet respectively,
slept a mother and eight children. The Clerk
to this Council admitted that no systematic
inspection had been made of this grossly in-
sanitary village for at least seventeen years.
One can hardly have two more striking

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS? 137

instances of the evils arising from leaving land
in the hands of either large or small owners —
the Scylla and Charybdis of British agriculture
— than the parish of Shipham, and the adjoin-
ing parish of Rowberrow, which is entrely
owned by its squire. Here the population in
1 83 1 was 392. It has now dwindled to one-
fourth of that number.

The village lies in a beautiful gorge, and the
wrecked roofs and dismantled walls of the stone
cottages give it the appearance of some Alpine
village which has suffered from an avalanche.
Nothing worthy of the name of farming was
to be seen on the land, all being laid down
to grass. Sport alone seemed to absorb
the energies of the governing classes. The
vicarage was an empty house, and the church
was served by the vicar of Shipham. The
school had also been closed, and on the death
of the present generation of squatters every bit
of land reverts to the squire, which means that
in time this beautiful little gorge will be
emptied of life.1

There are some who would make a patch-
work quilt of England with peasant proprietors
wearing the tricolour of landlord, farmer, and
labourer. Under their scheme the nation or the
State would stand outside as an alien intruder,
as something always to be regarded with cold-

1 Vide A History of the English Agricultural Labourer,
1870-/920, by F. E. Green, p. 188.

138 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

ness if not with hostility. But I have too
much love for my fellow-countrymen to let
them be tempted by the magic of property
to cut so mean a figure in the eyes of the
world. Under the black magic of property
thrift degenerates into a vice, and the jolly
English ploughman would be lost for ever
in the painfully respectable and petty-minded
peasant-proprietor who has no thought out-
side of his patch of land and the hoarding of
mean savings.

I have yet to learn that even the English
labourer when turned tenant-farmer is more
desirable either as a citizen or as an agricul-
turist, than those who derive from farming
stock for many generations ; and rather than
a nation of peasant-proprietors I would fain
see England converted to one large joint-stock
farm.

I would rather, I say, have England as a
large joint-stock farm with Lord Chaplin as
chief carter, Mr. Overman as chief bullock
tender, Mr. Rea, C.B.E., as chief shepherd,
Mr. Langford as chief cowman, Sir J. L. Green
as chief swineherd ; and, when Covent Garden
salesmen have as good Zionists gone home
to Jerusalem and builded their palaces and
tabernacles out of the money taken from our
market gardeners, Mr. Robbins, O.B.E., as
chief salesman of fruit and vegetables. He
may hanker after the flesh-pots of publicists

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS? 139

so that he could write long letters to the
papers to explain how, as a paid servant, the
labourer was worthy of his hire ; but he
would, I opine, make a better salesman.

Speaking generally, small holdings are more
successful where the occupiers have not had to
sink the bulk of their capital in purchasing
land. As tenants they have achieved a large
measure of success in favoured spots such as
the vale of Evesham, and the fenlands of
South Lincolnshire. The vale of Evesham
presents a picture of smiling prosperity due
partly to the soil, climatic conditions, the near-
ness to markets, and to the " Evesham
custom" in tenant rights which the Govern-
ment has now adopted as a national custom.
Yet if one examines an estate map and detects
the number of times the same name appears on
different one or two acre strips, one instantly
realises the appalling waste of time there must
be in cultivating land divided up in this
manner. Nearly every small holder in
Evesham possesses a bicycle. There is not
only the waste of time in cycling to your hold-
ing and back, but when you find you are able
to cultivate more than one acre, there is the
waste of time in cycling from one strip to
another, and your various strips may be divided
by many other strips, rented by individuals who
are put to the same inconvenience as you are.
Then imagine the economic waste in the pur-

140 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

chase, delivery, and distribution of manures,
in the picking and marketing of fruit, to say
nothing of the impossibility in these circum-
scribed areas of using the plough, the cultivator,
or the horse-hoe.

Profitable as these strips of land are, culti-
vated with skill and assiduity, how much
more profitable, one cannot help thinking —
how much more productive, how much energy
would be saved, and anxiety, too, if the whole
area were divided into one or two large farms
or market gardens, and then cultivated co-
operatively.

To do justice to Small Holdings Committees
of County Councils, I must say that since the
War they have adopted a policy of acquiring
farms instead of fields for approved applicants ;
that is to say, they have bought larger estates
or portions of estates, so that the small holders
can practise co-operation more effectively, and
supervision is easier. At the same time, each
individual small holder cultivates in his own
way, and co-operation, such as it is, is purely
voluntary.

The small holder very often, even in the
vale of Evesham, exchanges his servitude to
a master for a servitude to the land ; and,
perhaps, what is worse, his family become
overworked. The discoveries of science, new
inventions in labour-saving machinery, often
leave the small holder cold, because his acreage

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS? 141

is too small for their application. It is true that
he can show a greater production to the acre
than the large farmer in vegetables, fruit, and
poultry, but he cannot compete with the large
farmer in the production of meat and corn,
nor in the production of milk, though many-
successful small holders are dairy farmers.

It is obvious that an extensive farm is re-
quired for the keeping of a fine flock of sheep
or a herd of cattle, where first-class bulls are
kept, and although there are a number of
successful small holders who keep a few cows,
I am sure that the production of milk would be
greater, its quality cleaner, the labour extended
in its production lessened, if the cows were
kept on well-regulated large dairy farms. Not
much attention is paid to cleanliness in small
cow-sheds, and on small grass farms few up-
to-date labour-saving machines are to be
found for the cleaning out of cow-sheds, or for
the distribution of manure, and it is on these
small farms where there is an enormous waste
of time in the delivery of milk, even if it is
only to a railway station.

But there are even stronger objections to the
small farm as an economic unit. Small fields
may be convenient to the individual holder, but
the ground taken up by hedges and banks, the
weeds and pests they harbour, are a national
waste. It is said that in one estate in Notting-
hamshire, on which the tractor was used at the

1 42 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

beginning of the War, not less than 200 acres
were recovered by grubbing up the hedges and
filling up the ditches.

When it comes to the use made of machinery,
the advantages in favour of the large farm
are overwhelming. Consider how little an
expensive machine like a self-binder, or a
mowing machine is used on an ordinary mixed
holding. It might be worked for a week or
two, and then put aside probably to rust until
harvest comes round again. The advantage is
still greater when you come to compare the use
which can be made of machinery on thousands
of acres under collective control and the in-
dividual use of a machine on an ordinary farm
of only 300 acres. Climatically, of course, the
seasons are the same for both, but on the farm
extending over a thousand acres the period of
use would be greater, beginning with an early
cut of " seeds," extending to harvesting clover
for seed, or hay growing in fields on a northern
slope, late to mature, or to the reaping of spring-
sown corn left to ripen until the hunter's moon
is riding to the full.

The large farm, too, has the enormous
advantage over the small farm in the effective
organisation of labour, and in finding a greater
scope for winter employment. The large farm
equipped with great barns and sheds, in which
an engine can be worked for grinding corn into
meal, for cutting chaff, for pulping roots, for

SMALL HOLDINGS OR LARGE FARMS? 143

sawing wood, can keep its whole staff going on
wet days, especially if wagons and implements,
which have to be cleaned and repaired, are
under cover, and there is a smithy or forge, as
well as a carpenter's shop, attached to the farm.

On the other hand, the small farmer, especially
on heavy clay land, with very limited out-
buildings is often at his wit's end in wet weather
to keep his men employed. The same applies
to the small market gardener, who has no glass-
houses, and the tendency is, as wages rise,
together with the cost of farm implements,
repairs, fertilisers, and feeding stuffs, for the
small farmer on a holding, say, from twenty to
eighty acres insufficiently equipped, to dispense
with hired labour altogether and to rely entirely
upon the labour of his family.

This is no matter for surprise. In indus-
tries other than farming can be seen the same
tendency, which leads me to the conclusion that
for the next year or two we shall see an ex-
tension of large farms either managed by one
individual or by joint-stock companies. We
must remember that the tractor has come to
stay.

CHAPTER IX
FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT

WITH the extended use of the tractor
and the provisions for the employ-
ment of labour under cover in winter,
the advantage lies all on the side of broad acres.
Yet holdings cannot be stereotyped like build-
ings, put up for the manufacture of articles.
We must be guided by the physical geography
which surrounds us. The hill and the plain,
the chalk, the heavy clay, the light sandy loam,
the precipitous downland, and the flat fenland,
must, as Nature demands, have different types
of farming applied, according to the quality of
the soil and to the contours of the land. In some
districts intensive cultivation on small holdings
might still, with advantage to the nation, be
carried out. But in most districts it would be
more economic to combine many holdings of
an inconvenient size and to work them under
one management, or under a guild of craftsmen.
Agriculture is the one industry under capital-
istic competition in which we can repeat that
boomerang cry, " More production," without
fearing that the returning blow will strike some-

M4

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 145

body's stomach. Instead of seeking conces-
sions in Siberia or Mesopotamia, we should be
applying British capital to our wasted acres,
reclaiming the heath, the low-lying moor and
bog, the salt marsh, and the upland sheep walk,
of which we have lost from cultivation some
800,000 acres, since 1892.

The demand for timber during the War has
left terrible gaps in our beautiful woods. Re-
afforestation is needed not only in these, but in
wide open spaces such as Exmoor and Ash-
down Forest, and on hills, such as the Cots-
wolds, where there is little water, planting
might be profitably carried out, as well as in
other parts of England where the altitude is
not greater than 1200 feet. Ever since the
creative elements of feudalism have languished
under an unpatriotic industrialism, private enter-
prise has entirely neglected forestry. Owners,
naturally enough, say they cannot plant for
posterity. That is obviously the duty of the
State. Let us therefore display some noble
patriotism and no longer defer the date of
planting. If our land was properly cultivated,
reclaimed, and reafforested, there would be no
unemployed person in our villages and far
fewer in our cities. Under nationalisation no
idler will be enriched, and yet the whole
community will become wealthier.

And here let me say that many of our farm
workers are following a will-o'-the-wisp in their
10

146 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

clamour for the employment of so many men to
the hundred acres. That will not help them in
the least. It is a perfectly natural cry, but one
which is productive not of bread but of wind.
Apart altogether from the great physical differ-
ences between the texture of hillside grazing
land and rich fenland there are the variations to
be found between arable field and arable field in
poverty and richness of soil. There is also the
marked difference to be seen between the capital
and the organising capacity possessed by one
farmer and another. There is many a good
farmer who, with up-to-date machinery, strong
horses, and a capacity for organising labour,
will produce far more corn from a hundred
acres with three men, than an inefficient farmer
will with six men. Farm workers should
clamour for a high standard of husbandry, and
insist upon it being carried out. They should,
above all, demand the right to be partners in
their own industry. If that were done there
would be no unemployed in their ranks.

Imagine for a moment what splendid flocks
and herds and crops could be raised under
skilful management on the capital contributed
by the whole community, by utilising every
discovery of science, every newly - invented
leisure - giving implement, and harnessing
electric power to make that do all the donkey
work ! Every worker would have a direct
interest and pride in keeping up the standard

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 147

of production and keeping down its cost. Such
farms, worked by Guilds in which the workers
have as much interest relatively as the
managerial staff, would give an enormous
impetus to production.

The spirit of men working as comrades, each
helping the others to lighten the labour of all,
on a large farm where fertile suggestions are
encouraged, where a sporting emulation im-
pels them to see that their horses, cattle, and
sheep shall be the finest in the country, and urges
them to increase the vield from each acre, and
to improve the speed with which the harvested
crops are carried, would surely be far different
from the mean and envious spirit often dis-
played by small holders or farmers, or even
labourers, secretive with their little bit of extra
knowledge. We shall thus stimulate the
growth of a regional as well as a national
patriotism, founded not on the hatred of other
countries, but on the love of one's own country.

There would be no more hay left in windrows
on a fine afternoon with clouds overhead, or
corn left to stand in stooks when it should
be carried, to spoil after a night of rain, such
as one has witnessed again and again during
the last two years because the farmer grudges
paying overtime rates.

The lonely figure working with leaden heart
in the middle of a wide field will no longer be
a familiar feature of our deserted countryside.

148 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

Instead, we shall have a gay company of
comrades working in unison. The nightmare
of Luddite riots will become as ludicrous a
vision as scarecrows. Those cunning bits of
iron and steel, endowed as it were with life as
they traverse the fields or revolve in the yard,
so feared by men in the past, will henceforth
become the lively servants and not the masters
of those who feed them with oil and petrol.

On large farms of, say, from 2000 to 10,000
acres worked under one management or guild
there should be scope for the employment of
men and women of scientific attainments who
have not only theoretical knowledge but
practical experience. Thus we should get what
British agriculture has lacked for a hundred
years, not only capital, but brains of the highest
order.

It is common knowledge that the cleverest
of our young men, whether they be the sons of
landowners, farmers, or labourers, leave the
land because there seems to be little scope for
them if they lack capital. Owing to this want,
the best of our young men when they leave
agricultural colleges, do not become farmers,
but take up posts on rubber and tea plantations
abroad, or become land agents or lecturers
at home.

The large farm, communally owned and
administered, will give the man whose capital
consists of his brains and personality an

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 149

opportunity now denied. It is essential to the
proper working of these large farms that our
educational system should be drastically im-
proved and democratised. Agricultural techni-
cal schools must be established which shall be
open to all capable of profiting from their
courses. In preparation for these schools the
rural children's elementary education should be
conducted with at least as much belief in its
value as is evinced in the most enlightened
urban centres. No longer must the years
devoted to school be regarded as years filched
from the profit-making routine of a calling in
which the child of the cottage is always
doomed to the subordinate positions.

The rural teachers must be as well qualified
as he, and especially as she, who teach in
urban schools. We must secure the abolition
of the supplementary teacher from the country
school. It is no longer possible to engage her
in urban areas. Why, then, should the children
of the agricultural worker be left to the tender
mercies of the woman, who, having attained
the mature age of eighteen, qualifies to teach
in the school by alleging that she has been
successfully vaccinated^ I never yet heard of
an Education Authority insisting on seeing the
outward visible signs of that peculiar method
of proving the existence of the inward spiritual
graces of the fully equipped educationist.

The teacher of the rural school should be in

i5o A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

a position that will make him regard the rural
school as an end in itself, and not merely the
lowest rung in a ladder of promotion whose
top is always in a large town school. The
establishment of efficient rural Central Schools
under the Act of 191 8 will help in this direction
as well as in bringing together children from
neighbouring villages. It is no small educa-
tional gain to bring the child-mind of one
village into contact with other minds in a
similar stage of development from other
villages.

Without the large farm and communal
management, improved education will be of
little value to the village itself. The life of
the adult in the country must be one that an
ordinarily cultured mind can live with self-
respect before the advantages of sound general
education will do other than urge the scholar
to seek more congenial surroundings in the
town, or in the more democratic atmosphere of
the Colonies.

The increase of the rural population that
would come with the more economic manage-
ment of farming, the establishment of many
industries now unknown in the villages, — both
these factors would co-operate with the im-
provement of education to provide an outlet
in agriculture for personal aptitudes that are
now unwanted by those who control the rural
life of England. The early technical training

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 151

of the agriculturist should be on properly run
farms under the management of the Agri-
cultural Committee. There the pupil should
be taught all that science can bring to the aid
of the farmer.

The lad and the girl who have proved them-
selves to possess aptitude for the land, no
matter whether they have been born in the
village or the town, should be as carefully
trained for their future career as are entrants
to the Navy. The latter are trained on board
a ship ; the former must be trained on a farm.
The general education of the youthful naval
officer is not neglected, and both the general
and technical education of our farm workers
would benefit if, on the pupil reaching an age
— certainly not younger than fifteen — the
two branches of learning were developed
simultaneously. At the same time, the boy
at a farm school who evinces a dislike to
agriculture should be given the opportunity to
continue his education at an urban secondary
school. The idea that all that is wanted from
the schools is a constant supply of cheap,
servile labour must be ruthlessly eradicated.

In my opinion there should be winter schools
established as well for the extended education
of those who desire further instruction. Here
the fast vanishing crafts of hedging, thatching,
hurdle-making, etc., should be taught. The
intricacies of constructing and repairing modern

152 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

agricultural machinery might also be practically
explained in these institutions, to which repair-
ing workshops should be attached. Every
county should have a number of demonstration
and experimental plots for the enlightenment
of both the young and the middle-aged. In
short, the communal farm will need, and will
demand, the very utmost assistance learning
can bring to agriculture. Peripatetic teachers
are all very well as a makeshift, but convincing
demonstrations in scientific agriculture cannot
be performed by a series of conjuring tricks
in a lecture room.

The entire cost of education should be borne
by the nation, and none of it raised by County
Councils. Similarly, the repairing of county
roads scored by the wheels of heavy motor
lorries, travelling from one great town to
another, should be borne by the Exchequer.

Much has been written about agricultural
education, co-operation, and credit banks, and
I do not propose to add to the tonnage of those
ponderous tomes. But I must say a few words
about marketing and transport, for men will
work with no heart at farming if the fruits of
their labour are robbed from them by those who
control the market stalls and the cattle rings.

As far as joint-stock banks are concerned,
though they may have been helpful in the past
to distressed agriculturists, the last thing in
the world that we should do is to ask bankers

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 153

to finance any new agricultural schemes. In
a policy such as I have outlined, the State
alone should be the banker. Any attempt to
increase the sphere of the joint-stock banks
would be to increase the difficulties of land
nationalisation. The banks are to-day obtain-
ing a powerful grip on the land, as most of
the money that farmers have raised in order
to buy their holdings has been advanced by
banks. It is notorious that many of these
farmers have paid much too high a price to
landowners, and when the crash comes, banks
will become owners of much of the land of
Great Britain.

In the control of markets and transport, that
is to say, in the conveyance, distribution, and
selling of all farm produce, in sending cattle,
sheep, and pigs to districts where they could
be reared with the greatest economy and
success, and in sending fodder and food where
they are most needed, the National Council
of Agriculture, or Ministry of Agriculture,
would come into effective play. Nothing could
be more ludicrous or disheartening than the
present method of sending goods to salesmen
who are in close alliance with one another, and
who reap fortunes out of the charming trust-
fulness of the producers. Nothing could be
worse than the vested interest in markets with
the congestion of their mean streets. When
it comes to selling live stock the price often

154 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

depends, not so much on the value of the
beasts, as on the rings of dealers who may
or may not be present. Indeed, prices may
depend on whether these gentlemen have had
their lunch or whether they have a train to
catch. In any case, the consumer does not
benefit by the losses incurred by the producer.

Transport service must be linked up from
John o' Groat's to Land's End by a national
system, and particular attention should be paid
to the utilisation of canals and the short trans-
port distances in which motor lorries should
be employed in the collection and delivery of
goods from and to the nearest railway station or
market town. It is in these short distances that
the greatest waste takes place. A tremendous
saving might be effected in the repeated hand-
ling of heavy material like fertilisers.

Municipal markets should be immediately
established, where goods should be sold by
salaried auctioneers who are neither farmers
nor market gardeners, nor have shops of their
own to supply. When agricultural organisa-
tion becomes complete, these salaried salesmen
will naturally evolve into distributing agents
for the whole community. As things stand
to-day, there should be no difficulty in the
Government being supplied with farm produce
from county farms in order to feed the Army
and Navy.

But before the land can be properly culti-

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 155

vated we shall have to house a very much
larger rural population. Between 1872 and
I9I4» 3i rnillion acres of land were lost to
the plough. We recovered some of this in
191 7-1 8, yet I suppose to-day we have still
2 million acres to plough to bring ourselves
up to the level of 1872. This would mean
cottages for at least an additional 50,000
workers, without taking into consideration the
greater number which would be required for
intensive cultivation, or for men employed at
reclaiming the waste, or indeed for housing
adequately the people already living in villages,
for whom alone it is estimated another 200,000
houses are needed.

In making any attempt at village-planning
we should immediately "re-enclose" the land
which lies close to village streets, not only to
provide for the growth of the village and to
forestall the creation of a huddled rural slum,
but also to provide villagers with allotments
and pastures handy for the keeping of a cow, a
pony, ducks, or hens. Our moribund Parish
Councils would have some new life infused into
them if they had the control over these small
areas of common land. If they were also made
the watchdogs of bad cultivation, becoming the
advisory sub-committees, reporting to County
Agricultural Committees, farm labourers would
take a greater interest in Parish Council
elections.

156 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

In planning villages, foresight is needed in
selecting sites for those factories of the future,
which, in a well-organised State, should be in
the country and not in the congested cities.
Unnecessarily costly freightage and deteriora-
tion in quality is experienced in the sending of
soft fruit from the orchard to the town factory.
In transport, this sometimes assumes a ludicrous
proportion, such as when large quantities of
raspberries are sent from Perthshire to London,
or of strawberries from Kent to Aberdeen.
Fruit and vegetables are often forwarded from
Evesham to London and back to Birmingham
or Cardiff.

Fresh, soft fruit should not be pulped in the
Whitechapel Road, but where it is grown, amid
the Kentish orchards or the strawberry fields
of South Hants. Vegetables should be dried
in factories in the districts where vegetables
are grown, and sugar extracted in beet-growing
districts. Bacon factories should be erected
where herds of swine are kept ; and butter
redolent of dewy pastures should not be made
in the odorous purlieus of Limehouse, but where
the air is sweet with the fragrance of vernal
grass. Sites, too, must be sought for the
foundry where farm implements are to be
wrought, and for the sawmill where planks for
building and posts for fencing can be ripped.

The jam and vegetable drying factories and
creameries should provide work for women who

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 157

wish to gain their economic independence, and
each factory should be worked as a Guild, co-
operating with the farm workers, all forming a
rural civilisation in an interchange of goods and
social life, such as is almost unknown in the
present day.

More houses are the only real solution to
the intolerable restrictions imposed upon those
whose fate it is to live in farm-tied cottages, and
it is in supplying this urgent need that County
Agricultural Committees would, if constituted
on the lines I have advocated, in a large
measure bring about the redemption of the
empty countryside.

Men whose duty it is to look after live stock
should, to be in attendance when animals are
born or are sick, live somewhere close to
the stockyard and the lambing fold. Cottages,
whether they are on the farms of private land-
lords, or in State-owned farms, must, in that
sense, be farm-tied. Nevertheless, as long as it
is within the power of the landlord, as it is even
under the "protection" of the Agriculture Act,
to turn the worker out, giving him only a week
or two's notice, or on the recommendation of
the District Wages Committee, we cannot truly
make it a boast that the Englishman's home is
his castle. It is reasonable to assume that a
farmer's stockman's cottage should be occupied
by one of his stockmen, but it is an intolerable
state of tyranny if, when the farmer and worker

158 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

fall out, the worker is liable to have his goods
and chattels pitched out on to the roadside.
Every tenant should be subject to six months'
notice, especially in view of the fact that he
has probably put much labour into his cottage
garden. And if the farmer must have a man
while he is waiting for the discharged employee
to leave, he should lodge him in his own farm-
house, which is generally contiguous to the
stockyard, and board and lodge him as was
the custom in the old days.

But there is the general housing problem to
be solved ; and here let me clear up a popular
misconception as to housing administration in
rural districts. We have the Housing of the
Working Classes Act, and we have the Housing
and Town Planning Act, 1909, but in spite of
its powers and provisions to build, it has closed
eleven times more houses than it has built.
Although the Small Holdings and Allotments
Act of 1908 was in no way designed to be a
housing act, yet under its provisions many
more cottages have been built than under
the Housing Acts, and since the War, in the
administration of the Small Holdings and
Land Settlement Acts, the building of country
cottages on the larger estates now being broken
up has proceeded at a far more rapid rate.

There is no administrative body which has
failed more disastrously in England in the
administration of local government than our

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 159

Rural District Councils, composed for the most
part of reactionary farmers. And this has
been the housing authority for rural districts.

Although it was resolved two years ago to
build six cottages in my own parish, not a single
brick has yet been laid. Why six was the
figure decided upon I cannot tell, for I am sure
that if an inquiry were made amongst those
who live in overcrowded cottages, and of the
engaged young people waiting to get married,
probably we should find not six, but thirty or
forty, cottages were required. What is wanted
to-day is a new inquiry held all over the country
and the publication of up-to-date reports of
Medical Officers of Health ; though I very
much doubt if respectable libraries like Mudie's
would handle these reports, so staggering to
the sensitive mind would be the revelations of
Zolaesque obscenities due to overcrowding.

I see no reason why the Rural District
Council should not cease altogether to be the
housing authority, and the County Agricultural
Committee be made responsible for the building
of cottages, for under the Land Settlement Act
they now have power to build a cottage on half
an acre of land.

County Agricultural Committees would have
enormous economic advantages over Rural
District Councils, both in being able to acquire
large estates and to use the raw material con-
tained therein. They would have the chalk,

160 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

the clay, the sand, and some of the wood and
slate required. Guilds of brickmakers, and
building operatives, might easily act in co-
operation with Guilds of farm workers, and the
saving to the community in the cost of building
materials would be great. The presence of
blacksmiths, engineers, carpenters, and brick-
layers on large farms would be most helpful to
agriculturists in effecting repairs to building
and machinery. Houses, however, would have
to be provided for those who build houses.
Accommodation might in some measure be
found in the empty rooms of large country
houses. We had to house soldiers thus in
war-time ; why not house the soldiers of
industry in this period of reconstruction ?
Large country houses with about thirty bed-
rooms, and affording accommodation for two
old ladies and a lap-dog might be usefully
converted into country inns. Incidentally, in
supplying food to the operative builders and
other industrial workers direct from the farm,
not only would there be a ready market for a
portion of the produce but a saving in trans-
port expenses would be effected.

And the swarm of officials? Incidentally
farmers should be the last persons to complain
about hordes of officials. Their failure to de-
liver the goods in war-time, their incorrigible
law-breaking habits expressed by refusing to
pay the minimum wage, created a horde of

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 161

officials who, unfortunately, had to be kept by
the taxpayers. Such officials should not be
necessary in a well-organised State, for they
are non-producers. Farmers appear to have
a particular tenderness for officials if they are
privately employed, judging by the number of
men with something to sell, who swarm into
every town and village, overlapping one another
like a football scrimmage. Travellers, manu-
facturers' agents, brokers, wholesale and retail
salesmen, they and their motor-cars are all
welcomed with open arms by farmers, and
sustained in affluence by the farming com-
munity. Well might Sir Leo Chiozza Money
say in his book, The Triumph of Nationalisa-
tion : "If all the State offices (in war-time)
had been ranged in two straight lines" they
would have formed one fairly large street. A
much larger street would be formed by putting
together the offices of a single commercial
business, that of insurance — a business which
would be obsolete in a properly organised
society. This illustration may help some
critics of nationalisation to that useful gift —
a sense of proportion."

I wonder how many of us who ate our daily
bread in 191 7 realised that "officials" had
bought ^19,216,000 worth of wheat in that
year from the available world's supplies, at the
nominal cost of ,£18,000 for salaries and
establishment charges ; or how many of us
11

1 62 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

who wore wool, bought at a reasonable price,
realised that it was due to the world's clippings
being bought by a civil servant named Mr.
U. F. Wintour?

Instead of having to pay a horde of in-
spectors, which farming by inspectorship
means — visiting, at great cost of administra-
tion to the community, segregated units where
only a few men are employed in order to see
that other men are doing their duty — we should
get officials engaged in helping to produce food
for the nation. If farming under private
enterprise has been a ship adrift without a
rudder, farming under inspectors is merely
shouting directions from the shore to the
storm-tossed vessel.

No longer will men be appointed bailiffs or
foremen because they have shown a capacity
to be mean, to spy, or to bully, but because
they have shown skill at creative work, and
know how to inspire their fellow-workers with
lofty ideals.

It will be interesting to watch the difference
between the selfish spirit displayed by men
labouring on small holdings, and that displayed
by the Comrades of the Great Farm.

The work of the small holder, and of the
small holder's wife, is never finished. He and
she are always busy, and, despite all their
labours, there is always something more to be
done. And for the children, when they come

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 163

home from school, or, indeed, before they leave
home for school, there is often milk to be
delivered, cows to be got in, poultry to be fed,
and messages to be run. As for attending a
dance, or playing in a village game, that is
almost out of the question. It is as difficult to
tear a small holder away from his work to
attend a concert, let alone a political meeting,
as it would be to get him to write Greek verse.

If there happens to be a village library — a
rare occurrence — it is not visited by the in-
dustrious small holder. If there is a public
improvement proposed which will add to the
rates, it is promptly vetoed by the parsimonious
small holder, especially if he is an owner. No
wonder the children learn to hate the land, and
early come to look upon the ribbon of road
which leads to a town as the road to freedom,
to some El Dorado, where they can revive their
dying capacity for laughter. As they gaze
out of their bedroom windows at night, and see
the bright glow of the distant town on the
ebon-hued sky, they dream of some "Arabian
Nights' Entertainment " which will bring relief
to their life of ceaseless drudgery.

On the other hand, where the large farm is
organised with its company of working co-
partners, there surely shall we see the revival
of sports, of dancing, and of music. There
the village institute will become a live centre
for social thought and jollity. Politics will not

1 64 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

be excluded from the discussions, and the
library will consist of other books besides the
immortal works of Tupper, or of the excellent
Mrs. Henry Wood. Possibly we shall see
companies of pastoral players evolved, bringing
colour and merriment into our sombre sur-
roundings, in which black bowler hats and
dark clothes have been the outward and visible
sign of respectability. As I write I recall a
scene I was fortunate enough to witness last
May, which makes one hopeful that the divine
gift of laughter and the love of beauty is not
dead even in those who, with little to encourage
them, follow the plough to-day. . . .

The sunlight broke into a green radiance as
it shot its rays against the noble canopy of
beech leaves. Below the hanger lay the small
downland village where the rustics were revel-
ling in a dramatic gesture which seemed to
come as naturally to these stolid southern
Englishmen as that of casting seed across a
ploughed field.

With few exceptions all were sons and
daughters of the soil, and the soil was that of
Sussex. Behind the beech woods, across the
spacious upland deer park a many-turreted
castle stood in all its splendour to remind us
that feudalism could still hold sway in southern
England. Its walls were hung with ancient
armour, with tapestry, and the pillage of
monasteries. Its robing rooms were full of

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 165

the richest brocades ; but these riches gave
little joy, for nobody made use of them. They
who sustained the titled occupant by the sweat
of their brow would as little think of laughing
within its lofty walls as in a cathedral.

In the hamlet, a few miles away, men and
women and little children were decked in
colours as gay as any oriental city, and all
wore their bravery with the ease of trained
actors. I saw a young worker having his
toga (a curtain) pinned over his shirt, and his
brow crowned with bay leaves, with the un-
concern of a Roman born to the purple. Even
the village blacksmith, who swaggered about
in a scarlet coat (probably a bed-quilt), and the
old respectable Methodist, robed in a blue
dressing-gown, who led the May Queen's white
palfrey, looked as if they were playing parts
in a Midsummer Night's Dream.

Yet it was the old ladies in this motley
pastoral pageant, in which history seemed
indivisible from fairy tales, who struck me as
having the day of their lives.

It was with dramatic fitness that Roman
gentlemen in gold coloured togas, and Roman
matrons in green, with sandalled Vestal Virgins
in white, should march along the road which
led to a Roman village (Bignor), and that
Saxons, and folk of Shakespeare's England,
with elves, fairies, and witches should follow
until the Maypole was reached. It was,

1 66 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

however, the old ladies who wore wonderful
creations of a Georgian and early Victorian
age who sensed the drama of Life with the
keenest perceptions. When they brought
again to the light of a May morn the dresses
stored away in old oak chests, what memories
they unfolded ! With what ardency of youth,
what sentiments, passionate, regretful, or cling-
ingly sentimental had they been folded away !
Grandmothers brought out bridal dresses of
taffeta silk as blue as the sky overhead, which
their mothers had worn, and now they saw
with pride their slim granddaughters decked
in all the coloured bravery of a bygone day.

Those who had seen better days recalled
once more the triumphs of their youth. What
stories some of these dresses could have told !
There was the family, whose children fluttered
out like green and red butterflies, that had come
from yeoman stock and are now labourers.

Yet complete dresses were the exception and
not the rule, for most costumes were made up
of odds and ends. The rape of many a bed-
room had been carried out with ruthlessness.
Two yards of calico was all that these villagers
purchased, and yet how gay they looked in
their greens and pinks, their flaming scarlets,
and their orange as brilliant as the setting
sun !

Nobody came to see them from the towns —
no cinema operators, thank Heaven, and but

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 167

few motor-cars. It was a village community
pleasing itself and not the public.

When they halted to praise the Giver of all
good things, under the shade of trees at the
cross-roads, the two charming elves in green
hose and winged green hats bowed their sleepy
little heads across the cushion of moss which
held the May Queen's crown of flowers they
carried. Tiny white-winged fairies — babes two
or three years old — poised themselves for flight
from buttercup to buttercup, on the green
grass of the roadside, whilst doves of Peace
carved on ash-staves symbolised the universal
desire of goodwill towards all men.

No rehearsal had taken place, and it was the
first time that the village had held high revel
in old English fashion. As the violet shadows
deepened across the Downs, and the quaint old
folk song, " Summer is y-comen in," was being
sung, and the boy herald, gaily dressed in
blue, headed the procession which wound back
to the village, one surely could hear the horns
of elf-land faintly blowing from the fairy beech
woods ! Was he heralding a new avenue of
life opening out for our English youths and
maidens who were so gaily dressed as Dresden
shepherdesses, milkmaids, pedlars, and Jacks
in the Green ?

No one had to ask permission for a half
holiday in order to make merry. That battle
had been won. The young unmarried plough-

1 68 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY

men wore white flannels now with the artist's
son as in fellowship they danced the sword-
dance with graceful agility. Yes ; the jocund
youth of rural England meant to create a new
era for those who lived by the land. . . .
Down the lane where the overarching trees
formed a bower a new pattern was woven.
Narrow bands of white flannel now girdled the
pink and green of shepherdesses and milkmaids.

Whilst penning the last pages of this book
the fate of the Agriculture Act blown hither by
Lords and Commons hung in the balance. It
would require the bracing wind which sweeps
over the wold to sweeten the decaying leaves
of this Act, and even then I doubt if they are
worth preserving, for they are mostly autumn
leaves. None of them, however, litter the
carriage drives of parks, and I doubt if farmers
will ever gather them up even in order to
fertilise the land. They will probably be
swept up into a heap and burnt. Let us, there-
fore, start afresh with something which has a
touch of spring in it. Glancing eastward to-
ward the Dawn the horizon looks Red. The
pious, conservative-minded Russian peasants
have driven the Russian noble from off his
vast estate, and have become themselves lord
of the soil, dividing the spoil between them,
setting at defiance, we are told, the famished
Bolshevik workers of the towns, and slaughter-

FARMING BY COLLECTIVE EFFORT 169

ing the unguarded emissaries who demand a
share of the peasants' produce for the city
dwellers. There, the avenues to Arcadia are
closed by armed hordes of selfish peasant
proprietors. Here, in England's green and
pleasant land, let us take the right road while
it is still open to us. Let us, as Lord Ernie
said, have a sense of proportion ; let us take
the open road to Arcadia before it is too late !

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LAND NATIONALISATION, by A. Emil
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In the past the importance of the land problem has been
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LAND NATIONALISATION, by A. Emil
Davies, L.C.C., and Dorothy Evans (formerly
Organizer, Land Nationalisation Society).

In the past the importance of the land problem has been
neglected, but now the changed conditions brought about by the
war call for increased production at home. This book shows
that the present system of land ownership impedes production
on every hand and stands in the way of almost every vital reform.

The authors contend that no solution of the serious problems
that confront the community can be found until the nation
itself becomes the ground landlord of the country in which it
lives. They put forward a scheme for nationalisation complete
in financial and administrative details, providing for the partici-
pation of various sections of the community in the management
of the land.

THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK, by

Robert Williams (Secretary of the Transport
Workers' Federation).

The theme of this book is the new orientation of the aims of
international Labour. The author deals with the acute world-
need for increased output, and maintains that the workers will
consent to produce more only if and when they have assured
themselves that by so doing they will immediately improve their
economic status and ultimately establish a new social order.

A separate chapter dealing with the collapse of the Second and
the development of the Third or Moscow International indicates
the connection between the present political crises in many coun-
tries and the economic class-struggle which is now proceeding.

The author has a wide and varied experience of proletarian
conditions, and has drawn largely upon facts within his own
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SOCIALISM AND PERSONAL
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"Personal Liberty in the Socialist State" is an old controversy,
and the publishers feel that Mr. Dell's new volume will evoke
widespread interest and discussion.

The author shows that Socialism is not necessarily incompatible
with personal freedom, or with individualism properly understood,
but is rather an essential condition of both. He contends that
economic freedom is unattainable under Capitalist conditions by
any but the owners of capital and that individual liberty is being
threatened by political democracy, which is becoming a tyranny
of the majority.

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PROLETCULT, by Eden and Cedar "Paul
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The authors contend that among the working classes there are
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Proletcult (proletarian culture) organises and consolidates the
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artistic and intellectual life of the "new era". This great and
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AN AGRICULTURAL POLICY, by F.
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Whilst this book deals with the country-side, and will be
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