To-morrow on the Land

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 162, 31 July 1942, Page 3

To-morrow on the Land

war, we suggested some weeks ago, has been the inadequacy of go-as-you-please farming. A day or two before we made that remark the British Minister of Agriculture had been compelled to issue a warning that those farmers who could not raise their standards would have to make way for others who could, and the competent but cautious Sir Daniel Hall had apparently joined the ranks of the land nationalisers. We say apparently because Sir Daniel’s conversion was then known to us only at second hand, and his arguments from reviews in the Manchester Guardian, New Statesman, Countryman, and Geographical Journal. Now by the courtesy of the Country Library Service we are able to listen to Sir Daniel himself, and if we read a little more into the reviews of ‘this book (Reconstruction and the Land: Macmillan) than he actually says, we stopped short of some things that he says very plainly. () NE of the discoveries of the Briefly his argument is that farming has been going back in Britain for seventy years, and very rapidly for twenty years; that the structure which was still effective in the early days of the industrial revolution has been outmoded by science and modern machinery; and that the alternatives before the nation te-day are reconstruction by national planning or a period of destructive competition and confusion while the big man is eating up the small man and economic pressure is achieving clumsily and exPpensively what State action could achieve at once. Sir Daniel proposes, therefore, not that farming should be nationalised, but that all the land should be State-owned. The State, under his scheme, would buy all the land now "outside the jurisdiction of the cities", rearrange it into larger and more economic units, carry out "such works of drainage, reclamation, building and reconditioning" as may be necessary under modern conditions, then let it to tenants in the usual way. The State would be the only land-lord-if for no other reason than’ because the State is the only landlord able and willing to do what must be done if the industry is to recover-and in order to protect its tenants it would make available to them all the resources of modern science and of modern machinery. The land would be nationalised, the farming industry rationalised, and then Sir Daniel is bold enough to argue, we might again see the England that was once called merry.