SHAW’S OPINION

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 51, 9 July 1947, Page 2

SHAW’S OPINION

“PEEK OVER HEDGE” George Bernard Shaw in a letter to “The Times” of London recently urged Great Britain to turn to collective farming on the , Russian model.

The playwright said that after early Soviet experiments at solving agricultural problems, Premier Joseph Stalin “found the solution in collective farming.” “It is obvious enough—l myself have urged it again and again,” he declared, “that to expect an average farmer to be not only a sower and reaper, but an agricultural chemist, an accountant, a meteorologist, a veterinary expert, a merchant and financier, and a resident housekeeper, all united in a single Admirable Crichton, is ridiculous, yet this is our practice.

“The collective farm employs not only the best brains in the country, but provides as well for Hodge a little holding all to himself; the equivalent of our three acres and a cow.”

(“Hodge” is an English colloquialism for a rustic).

“As a man of letters, I may not steal a horse, but I may look over a hedge,” Mr Shaw wrote. “My observation has convinced me that under our existing agricultural system, only two classes of farmer can succeed in business: The man who has a sensible wife and is in his shirt sleeves 16 hours a day, and the landlord of a great estate who is wise enough to employ professional scientific advisers every season to dictate the farming operations.”