Can one assume that the pinch of this war is really bringing home to us
the vital need of growing our own food henceforth? I do not think so. Is
there any serious shame felt at our parasitic condition? None. Are we in
earnest about the resettlement of the land? Not yet.
All our history shows us to be a practical people with short views.
"_Tiens! Une montagne!_" Never was a better summing up of British
character than those words of the French cartoonist during the Boer War,
beneath his picture of a certain British General of those days, riding
at a hand gallop till his head was butting a cliff. Without seeing a
hand's breadth before our noses we have built our Empire, our towns, our
law. We are born empiricists, and must have our faces ground by hard
facts, before we attempt to wriggle past them. We have thriven so far,
but the ruin of England is likely to be the work of practical men who
burn the house down to roast the pig, because they cannot see beyond the
next meal. Visions are airy; but I propose to see visions for a moment,
and Britain as she _might_ be in 1948.
I see our towns, not indeed diminished from their present size, but no
larger; much cleaner, and surrounded by wide belts of garden allotments,
wherein town workers spend many of their leisure hours. I see in Great
Britain fifty millions instead of forty-one; but the town population
only thirty-two millions as now, and the rural population eighteen
millions instead of the present nine. I see the land farmed in three
ways: very large farms growing corn and milk, meat and wool, or sugar
beet; small farms _co-operatively run_ growing everything; and large
groups of co-operative small holdings, growing vegetables, fruit, pigs,
poultry, and dairy produce to some extent. There are no game laws to
speak of, and certainly no large areas of ground cut to waste for
private whims. I see very decent cottages everywhere, with large plots
of ground at economic rents, and decently waged people paying them; no
tithes, but a band of extinguished tithe-holders, happy with their
compensation. The main waterways of the country seem joined by wide
canals, and along these canals factories are spread out on the garden
city plan, with allotments for the factory workers. Along better roads
run long chains of small holdings, so that the co-operated holders have
no difficulty in marketing their produce. I see motor transport; tractor
ploughs; improved farm machinery; forestry properly looked after, and
foreshores reclaimed; each village owning its recreation hall, with
stage and cinema attached; and public-houses run only on the principle
of no commission on the drink sold; every school teaching the truth that
happiness and health, not mere money and learning, are the prizes of
life and the objects of education, and for ever impressing on the
scholars that life in the open air and pleasure in their work are the
two chief secrets of health and happiness. In every district a model
farm radiates scientific knowledge of the art of husbandry, bringing
instruction to each individual farmer, and leaving him no excuse for
ignorance. The land produces what it ought; not, as now, feeding with
each hundred acres only fifty persons, while a German hundred acres, not
nearly so favoured by Nature, feeds seventy-five. Every little girl has
been taught to cook. Farmers are no longer fearful of bankruptcy, as in
the years from 1875 to 1897, but hold their own with all comers, proud
of their industry, the spine and marrow of a country which respects
itself once more. There seems no longer jealousy or division between
town and country; and statesmen by tacit consent leave the land free
from Party politics. I see taller and stronger men and women, rosier and
happier children; a race no longer narrow, squashed, and
disproportionate; no longer smoke-dried and nerve-racked, with the
driven, don't-care look of a town-ridden land. And surely the words "Old
England" are spoken by all voices with a new affection, as of a land no
longer sucking its sustenance from other lands, but sound and sweet, the
worthy heart once more of a great commonwealth of countries.
All this I seem to see, if certain things are done now and persevered in
hereafter. But let none think that we can restore self-respect and the
land-spirit to this country under the mere momentary pressure of our
present-day need. Such a transformation cannot come unless we are
genuinely ashamed that Britain should be a sponge; unless we truly wish
to make her again sound metal, ringing true, instead of a splay-footed
creature, dependent for vital nourishment on oversea supplies--a cockshy
for every foe.
We are practically secured by Nature, yet have thrown security to the
winds because we cannot feed ourselves! We have as good a climate and
soil as any in the world, not indeed for pleasure, but for health and
food, and yet, I am sure, we are rotting physically faster than any
other people!
Let the nation put that reflection in its pipe and smoke it day by day;
for only so shall we emerge from a bad dream and seize again on our
birthright.
Let us dream a little of what we might become. Let us not crawl on with
our stomachs to the ground, and not an ounce of vision in our heads for
fear lest we be called visionaries. And let us rid our minds of one or
two noxious superstitions. It is not true that country life need mean
dull and cloddish life; it has in the past, because agriculture as been
neglected for the false glamour of the towns, and village life left to
seed down. There is no real reason why the villager should not have all
he needs of social life and sane amusement; village life only wants
organising. It is not true that country folk must be worse fed and worse
plenished than town folk. This has only been so sometimes because a
starved industry which was losing hope has paid starvation wages. It is
not true that our soil and climate are of indifferent value for the
growth of wheat. The contrary is the case. "The fact which has been lost
sight of in the past twenty years must be insisted on nowadays, that
England is naturally one of the best, if not the very best wheat-growing
country in the world. Its climate and soil are almost ideal for the
production of the heaviest crops": Professor R. H. Biffen. "The view of
leading German agriculturists is that their soils and climate are
distinctly inferior to those of Britain": Mr. T. H. Middleton, Assistant
Secretary to the Board of Agriculture.
We have many mouths in this country, but no real excuse for not growing
the wherewithal to feed them.
To break the chains of our lethargy and superstitions, let us keep
before us a thought and a vision--the thought that, since the air is
mastered and there are pathways under the sea, we, the proudest people
in the world, will exist henceforth by mere merciful accident, _until we
grow our own food_; and the vision of ourselves as a finer race in body
and mind than we have ever yet been. And then let us be practical by all
means; for in the practical measures of the present, spurred on by that
thought, inspired by that vision, alone lies the hope and safety of the
future.
What are those measures?