The great advance in 1811-1821 was presumably due to the cessation of the long war. In 1851-1891 actual depopulation occurred, but in 1891-1901 there was a gain of 1.95 per cent. Of the 112 districts, however, 73 showed actual decrease in 1891-1901, the total increase being entirely due to an advance in a few of the districts containing mines. It is clear that in the last 50 years there has been actual depopulation of strictly rural areas.

This becomes still plainer when we examine the facts given in the table on page 237 as to the natural growth of the rural areas.

THE MIGRATION FROM THE COUNTRY

It will be seen that in a rural population of nearly 5½ millions, the natural increase by excess of births over deaths was, in 1891-1901, 565,253, but in the same time 500,654 persons left these districts either for urban England or for places abroad, so that the total increase in population was only 64,599.

Turning to the number of persons employed in agricultural operations of all kinds, the table on page 239 shows the decline which has occurred.

This extension of the table given in "Riches and Poverty," Edition 1905, p. 223, modifies it somewhat. The reduction of agricultural labourers is not so great as the crude totals suggest. It is the women and boys who have chiefly disappeared from British agriculture, and it should be observed that 248,500 wives and daughters disappeared in 1871 as compared with 1861 merely by reason of the fact that they were enumerated at the earlier date but not at the later one. According to Lord Eversley's careful analysis ("Statistical Society's Journal," 1907), the actual decline of male agricultural employment (men and boys) in Great Britain was from 1,657,000 in 1861 to 1,236,000 in 1901, or, in England and Wales alone, from 1,449,000 in 1861 to 1,079,000 in 1901. This is a serious decline, but not as great as is commonly supposed.

Nothing is commoner than the belief that the trend to the towns is only to be observed in the United Kingdom. As a matter of fact it is confined to no country and is, indeed, a world-wide phenomenon. Between 1851 and 1906 the urban population of France increased from 25.5 per cent. to 42.1 per cent. of the whole. Between 1871 and 1905 the urban population of Germany increased from 36.1 per cent. to 57.4 per cent. of the whole. In both cases the population classed as "urban" is that contained in towns with at least 2,000 inhabitants.

ENGLAND AND WALES: PERSONS EMPLOYED IN
AGRICULTURE, 1851-1901

I remind the reader of these facts because it is necessary to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue in the arguments used in support of the cry "Back to the Land." As a general rule the stationariness of the rural population is attributed to cheap imports, or to land tenure, or to want of housing accommodation, or to the attractions of town life, or to the higher wages offered in industrial pursuits. All these things are causes of migration to the towns, but one of the most potent causes is rarely considered. It is the application of machinery and improved methods to agriculture. To produce a given quantity of food, far less labour is required than of old. Therefore, even in a country like France, which is almost independent of imported food, it is obvious that there must be a trend townwards as the labour displaced from agriculture seeks other employment.

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?

The question should be answered with due regard to all the considerations as to agriculture, housing and the distribution of population and industries which have been advanced in these pages. The problem of the town is before us, and not alone the question of the tilling of the soil. It should also be answered with due regard to the question of food importation and the probabilities as to the continuance of cheap supplies.

In 1875-6 the gross assessments of agricultural lands—an area very little larger than at present, for, as has been shown, the largest town occupies a relatively insignificant area—amounted to £67,000,000 or £15,000,000 more than at the present time. If we had bought in 1875, then, and rents had remained the same, we should have lost capital, but would the value of the land have remained the same? In thirty years we could have created a considerable yeomanry,—men holding land from the State not in fee simple, but nevertheless in absolute security of tenure. They could have paid us rentals at which small holdings would be eagerly competed for, yet rentals larger than are at present derived by the little sovereigns of the British country-side from their tenants. Further, we should have stemmed the current of humanity which for thirty years has flowed to the towns, and done something, in the phrase of Ruskin, to "get as much territory as the nation has, well filled with respectable persons."

My point as to the value that is and the value that might be is illustrated by Sir Robert Edgcumbe's experiment with Rew Farm, in the parish of Winterbourne St Martin, in Dorsetshire. Sir Robert bought this farm of 343 acres for £5,050, made a road through it, and sold it in small holdings at prices ranging from £7 to £20 per acre. The land was eagerly taken up and the experiment has been a great success. When Sir Robert bought the land in 1888 the outgoing tenant was in financial straits—he could not make Rew Farm pay. It was rented at £240 per annum and its net rateable value was £215. It is improbable that a new tenant would have paid more than £200. Yet, under small cultivation, the rateable value of Rew Farm rose from the £215 of 1888 to £346 in 1902, a rise of 60 per cent. In the same period, the rateable value of the parish of Winterbourne St Martin as a whole fell from £2,807 to £2,073.

Apart from the question of small holdings, nothing is more probable than a rise in the value of British agricultural land to a point far beyond any yet attained. Already, within the last few years, a revolution has taken place in our wheat supplies—a revolution which has gone unnoticed by the British public, so long accustomed to its miraculous cheap loaf in the baker's shop that the miracle has become, as is the fate of all miracles, a commonplace and unregarded thing. The table on p. 245 shows the nature of the change which has occurred: