第54章 TO THE COUNTRY!--THE FARM COLONY.(1)

A leave on one side for a moment various features of the operations which will be indispensable but subsidiary to the City Colony,such as the Rescue Homes for Lost Women,the Retreats for Inebriates,the Homes for Discharged Prisoners,the Enquiry Office for the Discovery of Lost Friends and Relatives,and the Advice Bureau,which will,in time,become an institution that will be invaluable as a poor man's Tribune.

All these and other suggestions for saving the lost and helping the poor,although they form essential elements of the City Colony,will be better dealt with after I have explained the relation which the Farm Colony will occupy to the City Colony,and set forth the way in which the former will act as a feeder to the Colony Over sea.

I have already described how I propose to deal,in the first case,with the mass of surplus labour which will infallibly accumulate on our hands as soon as the Shelters are more extensively established and in good working order.But I fully recognise that when all has been done that can be done in the direction of disposing of the unhired men and women of the town,there will still remain many whom you can neither employ in the Household Salvage Brigade,nor for whom employers,be they registered never so carefully,can be found.What,then,must be done with them?The answer to that question seems to me obvious.

They must go upon the land!

The land is the source of all food;only by the application of labour can the land be made fully productive.There is any amount of waste land in the world,not far away in distant Continents,next door to the North Pole,but here at our very doors.Have you ever calculated,for instance,the square miles of unused land which fringe the sides of all our railroads?No doubt some embankments are of material that would baffle the cultivating skill at a Chinese or the careful husbandry of a Swiss mountaineer;but these are exceptions.When other people talk of reclaiming Salisbury Plain,or of cultivating the bare moorlands of the bleak North,I think of the hundreds of square miles of land that lie in long ribbons on the side of each of our railways,upon which,without any cost for cartage,innumerable tons of City manure could be shot down,and the crops of which could be carried at once to the nearest market without any but the initial cost of heaping into convenient trucks.These railway embankments constitute a vast estate,capable of growing fruit enough to supply all the jam that Crosse and Blackwell ever boiled.In almost every county in England are vacant farms,and,in still greater numbers,farms but a quarter cultivated,which only need the application of an industrious population working with due incentive to produce twice,thrice,and four times as much as they yield to-day.

I am aware that there are few subjects upon which there are such fierce controversies as the possibilities of making a livelihood out of small holdings,but Irish cottiers do it,and in regions infinitely worse adapted for the purpose than our Essex corn lands,and possessing none of the advantages which civilization and co-operation place at the command of an intelligently directed body of husbandmen.Talk about the land not being worth cultivating!Go to the Swiss Valleys and examine for yourself the miserable patches of land,hewed out as it were from the heart of the granite mountains,where the cottager grows his crops and makes a livelihood.No doubt he has his Alp,where his cows pasture in summer-time,and his other occupations which enable him to supplement the scanty yield of his farm garden among the crags;but if it pays the Swiss mountaineer in the midst of the eternal snows,far removed from any market,to cultivate such miserable soil in the brief summer of the high Alps,it is impossible to believe that Englishmen,working on English soil,close to our markets and enjoying all the advantages of co-operation,cannot earn their daily bread by their daily toil.The soil of England is not unkindly,and although much is said against our climate,it is,as Mr.Russell Lowell observes,after a lengthened experience of many countries and many climes,"the best climate in the whole world for the labouring man."There are more days in the English year on which a man can work out of doors with a spade with comparative comfort than in any other country under heaven.I do not say that men will make a fortune out of the land,nor do I pretend that we can,under the grey English skies,hope ever to vie with the productiveness of the Jersey farms;but I am prepared to maintain against all comers that it is possible for an industrious man to grow his rations,provided he is given a spade with which to dig and land to dig in.Especially will this be the case with intelligent direction and the advantages of co-operation.

Is it not a reasonable supposition?It always seems to me a strange thing that men should insist that you must first transport your labourer thousands of miles to a desolate,bleak country in order to set him to work to extract a livelihood from the soil when hundreds of thousands of acres lie only half tilled at home or not tilled at all.

Is it reasonable to think that you can only begin to make a living out of land when it lies several thousand miles from the nearest market,and thousands of miles from the place where the labourer has to buy his tools and procure all the necessaries of life which are not grown on the spot?If a man can make squatting pay on the prairies or in Australia,where every quarter of grain which he produces has to be dragged by locomotives across the railways of the continent,and then carried by steamers across the wide ocean,can he not equally make the operation at least sufficiently profitable to keep himself alive if you plant him with the same soil within an hour by rail of the greatest markets in the world?