f
unsolved problems before me, that I am working towards the Great State.

Let me briefly recapitulate the main problems which have to be attacked
in the attempt to realise the outline of the Great State. At the base of
the whole order there must be some method of agricultural production,
and if the agricultural labourer and cottager and the ancient life of
the small householder on the holding, a life laborious, prolific,
illiterate, limited, and in immediate contact with the land used, is to
recede and disappear it must recede and disappear before methods upon a
much larger scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving great
economies. It is alleged by modern writers that the permanent residence
of the cultivator in close relation to his ground is a legacy from the
days of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great proportion of
farm work is seasonal, and that a migration to and fro between rural and
urban conditions would be entirely practicable in a largely planned
community. The agricultural population could move out of town into an
open-air life as the spring approached, and return for spending,
pleasure, and education as the days shortened. Already something of this
sort occurs under extremely unfavourable conditions in the movement of
the fruit and hop pickers from the east end of London into Kent, but
that is a mere hint of the extended picnic which a broadly planned
cultivation might afford. A fully developed civilisation, employing
machines in the hands of highly skilled men, will minimise toil to the
very utmost, no man will shove where a machine can shove, or carry where
a machine can carry; but there will remain, more particularly in the
summer, a vast amount of hand operations, invigorating and even
attractive to the urban population Given short hours, good pay, and all
the jolly amusement in the evening camp that a free, happy, and
intelligent people will develop for themselves, and there will be
little difficulty about this particular class of work to differentiate
it from any other sort of necessary labour.

One passes, therefore, with no definite transition from the root problem
of agricultural production in the Great State to the wider problem of
labour in general.

A glance at the countryside conjures up a picture of extensive tracts
being cultivated on a wholesale scale, of skilled men directing great
ploughing, sowing, and reaping plants, steering cattle and sheep about
carefully design