Thus, in considering land in its agricultural aspect we must not regard it as containing an unlimited field of employment. Agricultural methods will continue to improve, and the day will undoubtedly come when one man's work applied in agriculture will literally feed a multitude.
But, having made that reservation, let us look at the French and German figures in another aspect. We see that in France, although the urban population has increased, it is still much less than one-half of the whole. In Germany, again, the town population in 1910 is about 60 per cent. of the whole. In our own country, if we counted as urban population the inhabitants of all towns containing 2,000 and upwards, we should find it amount to over 80 per cent. of the whole. While, therefore, not losing sight of the reservation already made, it is clear that, in the United Kingdom, causes other than the application of machinery to agriculture have operated to produce urban congestion.
There was a time when no European country was so rich as England in men who cultivated their own land. To-day there is no country in the world in which cultivation and security of tenure are so widely divorced. Whatever the trend to the towns in other countries may be, there is no other country in which such a marked diminution in agricultural employment has occurred as in the United Kingdom. The land which bred the bowmen of Agincourt and the Ironsides of Cromwell now sends forth the men of whom Sir Ian Hamilton wrote to Mr Horsfall "I will not give you, a Manchester man, offence, if I say that their physique was hardly equal to the fine standard of their determination and courage.... It is the fault of some one that these brave and stubborn lads were not at least an inch or two taller and bigger round the chest, and altogether of a more robust and powerful build."
Looking at the industry of our people as a whole, the main fact which stands out is want of security of employment. Nearly the whole of our industrial workers are earners of weekly wages, and of our sparse agricultural population but a small proportion are owners. Compare the position of France. There, fully one-half the population are attached to the soil by virtue of ownership and secure in the mother-earth which nourishes them. They may be poor, many of these peasant proprietors, but at least they are not constantly on the verge of hunger; at least they have the glorious privilege of independence.
Our empty country-side is universally admitted to be a great national danger. It is not alone that we are so much dependent upon imported food; it is that the imported food is for the consumption of a race degenerating in the unwholesome environment of town life. Everywhere the cry of "Back to the Land" is raised, but, as though to mock that cry, it is only answered by well-to-do weekenders, attendance upon whom, in faked-up cottages from which labourers have been ousted, has become one of our many degrading trades of luxury.
We must be under no illusions. We must not believe that mature and debilitated town-dwellers can be planted out in rows to gain a living by entire devotion to agriculture. We can hope for but little from farm colonies for the unemployed. Our chief hope, here as elsewhere, is in the children. We must seek to attach our present rural population to the soil under such conditions that their children may see hope where now there is none.
How shall we secure allotments and small holdings for the agricultural labourer? Parliament in 1906-1909 has given much attention to rural problems, and the Small Holdings Act of 1908, setting up Commissions with power to make schemes for small holdings if County Councils neglect to do so, extending to eighty years the period for which money may be borrowed for the purposes of the Act, and giving powers for the compulsory acquisition of suitable land, is now in operation. The Report for 1908 shows that County Councils in England and Wales acquired 11,346 acres for small holdings and 304 acres for allotments.
We may venture to hope for better results than this, but is it asking too much of the nation, at this juncture, to broaden its conceptions? Why should we not, having regard to the extraordinary facts as to our national wealth and income, having regard to the admitted dangers of our present position, having regard to the best disposition and welfare of our 44,500,000 people upon their island home of 77,000,000 acres,—why, having regard to these things, should we not determine to secure absolute control of area, and, having secured it, to order the first essential of healthful life, proper distribution upon area?
As has been already pointed out in these pages, the 77,000,000 acres of the United Kingdom, outside the tiny spots called towns which occupy an almost negligible fraction of the whole, produce a gross rental of only £52,000,000. This is the sum at which the whole of the land of the United Kingdom, save that small part which is attached to houses, was assessed to Income Tax in 1908-9. It represents the rentals of agricultural lands as they stand with all their farm-houses and other buildings, roads, ditches, fences, etc. In 1898 the Royal Commission on Agriculture valued this land at only eighteen years' purchase. Twenty times £52,000,000 is only £1,040,000,000 or about one-half of one year's income of the country. This, it will be remembered, was the valuation of land which we adopted in Chapter 5.
The question I submit for consideration is this: Is it worth our while to buy up our own birthright at the price of one-half of a single year's income?