The Daily News. WEDNESDAY. SEPTEMBER 27, 1911. "LET'S GATHER MUSHROOMS!"

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 82, 27 September 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY. SEPTEMBER 27, 1911. "LET'S GATHER MUSHROOMS!"

Dissatisfaction is the hafndm'ald of progress, for the absolutely contented man wants nothing, and therefore lias 110 ambition. The millionaire holds that the peasant should bo content with his eighteenpcncc a day, but that a million ,- pounds a year is all too small for himself. He is' v'ot satisfied when he achieves this result. If it were* in his nature to be satisfied with anything, he could not become a millionaire. The eigliteenpenny peasant who is satisfied will not set the Thames or the Seine or even the Waiwakaiho afire. So humanity, because it is working towards a goal of comfort and possible competence, is not satisfied. This state of dissatisfaction is the genesis of commercial expansion, a question of percentage, a matter of grab. We all want more than we possess, and few of us are worth | a grea.t deal to society if /this natural I greed does not exist in us. The natural state of man is that of a tiller of the soil. Without a great amount, of labor, he may produce from the soil all that he needs in the way of food and raiment. The land was made for him—for all of likn. He hasn't got it, as a matter of fact, but 1 he othc,r fellow has his share and the shares of millions of his kind. He hasn't got the land because agrarian enterprise in many lands lias been allowed to dwindle into such a position that it seems a minor matter. On the contrary, it is the one vital matter. We find that countries which have developed an overwhelmingly great proportion of manufacturing people frequently raise the parrot cry, "Back to the land!" but refuse to go if provision is made for them. ,We find countries (like New Zealand) where much of the land is absolutely idle because it is too dear. And we are faced to-day with the fact that greedy commercialism in manufacturing lands is producing more goods than the world wants and depleting the earth's hatural stores of treasures that can never be replaced. The enormous advance in labor-saving machines has greatly aided output! It was not so much a question of getting rid of hands as of getting more machines to keep hands employed. The world is surfeited with goods, and the world is dissatisfied. The world can't help being dissatisfied when a huge proportion of trie people tramp down a dingy lane to a hissing factory, sweat all day at a mechanical task, and tramp the dingy lane again to go to bed. And so quite a number of eminent (and very likely intensely unpractical) people are saying, because, industry is in a world-wide t.ingle. that it has broken down, and that agrarian development is the only panacea for the "nerves" the nations are suffering from. Agriculture has climbed with the times. The man in 1 lie field of corn with a reap-hook is very useful as a subject fpr our unpractical artist. The person with a Hail on a threshing-floor is a mere absurdity. The modern way is not to permit the greatest number of people to till enough ground to grow their own food, but to grab enough land to make it. impossible for potential fillers to be other than subject fo the In milord and dependent on him for bread. The unit is not better oiT because 24-furrow steam ploughs tear thousands of acres of wheat land up, steaming sowing machines sow it :ind steam harvesters gather it. These giant means represent, in reality the disinheriting of the smaller tiller and the added grasp of corporate greed. Agriculture in many lands has become a. feverish process, allied to the rush of a great steel corporation to flood the markets with its goods, or of a gigantic timber combine to steal (he timber belonging to the next leu generations. The unit lias been disinherited and unity is the legatee, because the units have been, massed to produce the greatest quantity of unnecessary tilings in the smallest

I space of time. In some calm spots of the earth the unit still potters along in the primitive style his forefathers of two thousand years ago pottered. Indeed, the American steel plough is finding it difficult -at this moment; ti> get into some European peasant communities. The peasant's instinct tells him that the jettisoning of ancient methods means the wiping out of the unit as a self-supporting being, pot dependent on j the rise or fall of markets, American trust criminals, huge corporations or political roguery. Political economists, who are so frequently unpractical men with many degrees am( little real education, are crying out for agrarian development and urging the unit who is eating food to produce it, too. ' The country is not safe that cannot grow its own food, and few countries are doing so, although almost all countries might. For thaSe countries to produce the whole sum of their necessary food would mean'the creation of a new agricultural element and the withdrawal from manufacture of its discontented thousands. Unquifetionably, even the young countries show a desire to embrace manufacture rather than agriculture, mainly because the former creates more j money, which is not wealth. We have lately quoted figures showing the enormous "wealth" of Britain. They do not show that every Briton gets as much to eat as he want 3. The fact that Britain has supplied t'hree hundred million pounds for the world's railways in seventy-five years is no criterion of the ability of tens of thousands of Britishers to get one square meal a day. In agricultural communities there is rarely what is called "wealth," and just as rarely starvation. In commercial communities there are the painful «xI tremes that represent the unsolved pro|hiem of Christendom. Although tillage Lis the natural business of man millions of men, women and children in the world, chained to the wheels of commercialism, have never seen a field. These are the disinherited ones and there is no prospect of their Tight to inheritance being proved. Everyone remembers Phil May's picture of the London youngsters who were taken to the country for one glorious day. Said a little girl to the little boy: 'Let's gavver mushrooms!" Said the boy, "Yus, let's! I'm a terror to climb!" Political economists decide "Back to the land." The map who is not a political economist thinks of the London boy whose vision was. bounded by bricks and mortar and merely asks, "How*;". The political I economist tells you everything but "how."