"GO ON THE LAND!"

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9155, 31 July 1908, Page 4

"GO ON THE LAND!"

Perhaps the remedy for the unemployed problem most often suggested is "Put them on the land." Social reformers, contemplating the mass of unemployed, and sweated workers in the cities of the Old World and America, lament that they cannot transport them to the country and give them work in idyllic surroundings. But they forget that it is not everybody who is fitted for farm work. In a debate on farm colonies in the House of Commons recently, a Labour member, win had earned his living as a compositor, ridiculed the idea that anyone could work on a farm, and declared that on no consideration whatever would he take up work for which he knew he was quite unfitted. Farming is not philanthropy, and the farmer, even if he is shovt of labour, does Mot carj to entrust valuable animals and machinery to the care of a man who knows nothing about them. Yet city dwellers, rolling in the late afternoon by motor or train through beautiful rural districts lovely in their summer dress, when the low of cattle makes sweet music, and the weary farmer's wife, snatching a few minutes' rest in the porch—perhaps for the first time that day—makes an, idyllic picture -these city dwellers exclaim, "Oh, what a happy life these farmers must lead, and how strange it is that those awful unemployed peopla in the city won't coma out here!"