THE VILLAGE OF THE FUTURE.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2608, 30 March 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE VILLAGE OF THE FUTURE.

A COMBINATION OP INDUSTRIAL WITH AGRICULTURAL LABOUR. Agriculture is so much in need of aid from those who inhabit the cities, that every summer thousands of men leave their alums in the towns and go to the country for tho season of crops. The London destitues go in thousands to Kent and Sussex as hay-makers and hoppickers; whole villagers in Prance abandon their homes and their cottage industries in the summer and wander to the more fertile parts of the country ; and iu Russia there is every year an exodus of many hundreds of thousands of men who journey from the North to the Southern prairies for harvesting the crops ; while many St. Petersburg manufacturers reduce their production in the summer, because the operatives return to their native villages for the culture of their allotments. Extensive agriculture cannot be carried on without additional hands in the summer ; but it still more needs a temporary aid for improving the soil, or ten-folding its productive powers. The scattering of industries over the country —so as to bring the factory amid the fields and to make agriculture derive all those profits which it always finds in being combined with industry (see the Eastern States of America) and the combination of industrial and agricultural work are surely the next step to be made as soon as a reorganization of our present condition is possible. That step is imposed by the very necessities of producing for the producers themselves ; it is imposed by the necessity for each healthy man and woman to spend a part of his or her life in free work in the free air, and it will be rendored more necessary when the great social movements, which have now become unavoidable, come to disturb the present international trade and compel each nation to revert to her own resources for her own maintenance. — Prince Krapotkin, iu the Nineteenth Century.