rural districts, based upon the greater share of the products of the
farmer's industry, which the new business organisation will enable him
to retain; stimulated by the closer business relations with his fellows
which that organisation will bring about, and fostered by the closer
neighbourhood which is implied in a more intensive cultivation.

The development of a more intensive cultivation must carry with it a
much more careful consideration of the labour problem. The difficulty of
getting and keeping labour on the farm is a commonplace. I think farmers
have not faced the fact that this difficulty is due in the main to their
own way of doing their business. Competent men will not stay at farm
labour unless it offers them continuous employment as part of a
well-ordered business concern; and this is not possible unless with a
greatly improved husbandry.

To-day agriculture has to compete in the labour market against other,
and to many men more attractive, industries, and a marked elevation in
the whole standard of life in the rural world is the best insurance of a
better supply of good farm labour. Only an intensive system of farming
can afford any large amount of permanent employment at decent wages to
the rural labourer, and only a good supply of competent labour can
render intensive farming on any large scale practicable. But the
intensive system of farming not only gives regular employment and good
wages; it also fits the labourer of to-day--in a country where a man can
strike out for himself--to be the successful farmer of to-morrow. Nor,
in these days of impersonal industrial relations, should the fact be
overlooked that under an intensive system of agriculture, we find still
preserved the kindly personal relation between employer and employed
which contributes both to the pleasantness of life and to economic
progress and security.

Moreover, in a country where advanced farming is the rule, there is a
remarkable, and, from the standpoint of national stability, most
valuable, steadiness in employment. Good farming, by fixing the labourer
on the soil, improves the general condition of rural life, by ridding
the countryside of the worst of its present pests. Those wandering
dervishes of the industrial world, the hobo, the tramp--the entire
family of Weary Willies and Tired Timothys--will no longer have even an
imaginary excuse for their troubled and troublesome existence. But the
farmer who was the prey of these pe