Harvest Customs.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLV, Issue 264, 23 December 1903, Page 4

Harvest Customs.

A GREAT CHANGE. A great change hias come of recent years otver our English rural custom." in connection with har-vest-ia change tibat can only be descrilbed as the completion of the process of the commercilaills'atiion of aguTculttiro. Many who ean look back from mid«ile J age will remember haaivest as a time of jovial personal relationships amotnigßt the country folk of all degrees. From the morning when the first Scythe was put into the first' fielki to the evening when tine last loafd w>as in and everybody gntherefd at the harvest* home, it was all a merry-miaking, a Pagan revelry of good fellowship and ■thapfcfulmesß ft>r the sunshine arid the increase. It is all gone. There is no first-eftieaf feasting at harvest now, and only here and there does a!n olid-fashioned farmer keqp up the festival of harvesthome. Dn rural tales written in Fleeft-street, and in' pictorial art of a certain kind, these things still survive- ; but in actual fact the old social life of ballvest-tinie in our villages is as 'dead as the dodo. There is more ijn this than the disappearance of a cheerful old custom ; tiwwgfa' thnlt in itself would be grievous enougfti'. For this appearance is only one indication of the deep fiwidtumeaiftal change that over Eta|g>lish' rural life. The old personal reliationship between all village classes has vanished. The farmer aiad his laibtoureru are no longer held together by a sort of family sentiment. Only the moldern commercial cash bond of uniom now exists between them ; bhey are employer lanid his hands.

'•'Yjofci haw your \vttss for what you have done; why should I feast you as well 1" is the explalniatiotn of the disafcjpearofnce of the oM custom. Arid so the ancient and immemorial iadtuptry of retyping the fruits of the earth, which brought down to us from a time before commercialIsm existed its sense of personal relationship expressed in festive rejoicing, has yielded at last to the modern spirit.

It is trtue that we still have our harvest festival services, for which the church is (decorated with corn and fruit, and the vicar prepares a special harvest sermon:. But everybody feels it to be the poorest sort of pretence for the old- lost spirit of Oormuan rejoicing and tempting over the comj>letion of a common teak. The change was inevitable The old Custom was after all just a tot of surviving feudalism, with a touch of even earlier Pagan feeling in it. PeUraps we may some day attain again to a conception of solidarity anHi mutual interests in reral life, a new conception based upon common citizenship.—Westminster Budget.