dered
that the stream of life from the fields and the open sky into the
barracks of sooty, squalid cities may swell into an ever-increasing
river. We had only one ideal and that was cheap food. Other nations
carefully conserved the workers of the soil and protected them from a
competition that might deprive them of the reward of their labour.
During the last fifty years, while our population has rapidly
increased, our agricultural population has been diminished by a million
workers. A hundred years ago we had 9,000,000 acres producing wheat,
to-day we have only 1,800,000 wheat-growing acres. We have indeed
sacrificed our true life. In the whole of the British Empire, covering
a quarter of the globe, the total white population living on the land
is only 13,000,000, whilst that of Germany alone, working the land and
{60} living by it, has risen to 20,000,000. We had one watchword which
stirred our blood--the cheap loaf! The meaning of the watchword was
hid from us. For the cheap loaf meant cheap labour, and cheap labour
meant ever-increasing riches to the exploiters of toiling masses in the
lamp-lit cities. But the 'cheap loaf' meant for the country places
which yielded it, that the husbandman could not live by his labour.
Floods of oratory were poured forth; under the guise of philanthropy
the ideal of cheap food was held up in palpitating periods by
capitalists who reaped their sure reward in labour correspondingly
cheap, and the fields of England were steadily laid down to 'twitch and
thistle.' A generation wrought this desolation, unconscious of the
desolation that it wrought. The agricultural labourer became at last
obsessed by the watchword which wrought his ruin. Even Mr. Masterman
records with sympathy, if not with satisfaction, the attitude of the
farm labourer to the new 'fiscal reform.' {61} 'Oh dear!' is his
comment, 'we want no taxes on food.' We destroyed him, but we did it
so skilfully, and with so splendidly assumed an air of philanthropy,
that the worker on the land did not even recognise the instrument
wherewith we destroyed him. He has been the victim of political
factions--of politicians who have sacrificed the State to party. The
Conservatives not unnaturally made the monopoly in land a tenet of
their faith, and resisted every claim on the part of the poor to call
any portion of England, however small, their own; the Liberals made the
policy of Free Trade an inviolable doctrine, and thou