d. He knows too much, and he can get what he wants
without it. He may lease a house, he does take shooting, but he won't
buy an estate.

When thinking of the importance of freedom of experiment and of a ladder
with no missing rungs, I have my mind on the possibility of the owner of
one estate of from 5,000 to 10,000 acres throwing all the farms and many
of the fields together and making his best tenants fellow-directors with
him of a joint enterprise, one doing the buying and selling, one looking
after the power and the tractors and implements, one planning the
agricultural processes, one directing the labour and so on. This gives a
prospect of the greatest production and the greatest profit, and it
gives a really good labourer a chance which at present he has not got.
At present, unless he leaves the land, in nine cases out of ten once a
labourer always a labourer. My vision would give him a chance to become,
first, foreman, then assistant manager, manager, director, and
managing-director. It ought to be tried--but how one's tenants would
loathe it, and quite natural too! At present if things go wrong, if it's
not the fault of the Government or the weather, it's the farmer's own
fault. On my joint-stock estate every director and manager would feel
that all his colleagues were letting him down and destroying his
profits. It is hard to make people accept at all readily, in practice,
the teaching that they are their brothers' keeper.

The scheme could hardly be started with men accustomed to the present
methods, and the cost of obtaining vacant possession of land would make
it difficult to try with new men. I am sure, however, that something of
the sort is a good and hopeful idea, and the best way of making the
ladder complete. And I am emboldened to think that something of the sort
will be tried gradually in some places, when I see the number of
landlords' sons who are in this and other universities taking the best
courses they can get in the science and economics of agriculture. They
know this is the only way to retain a remnant of the old acres. It is
quite new since the war--and a most hopeful sign.

INDEPENDENCE

I need not urge the importance in our villages of real independence of
life. It was the absence of independence combined with long working
hours and little occupation for the hours of leisure, which, more than
low wages, caused the pre-war exodus from the country. Should the
prospects of industry impro