Excerpt from A New Agricultural Policy

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.

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.

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