The answers are of national concern. First, as to facts.
There is, I think, no doubt that the new Minister of Agri- culture intends to make an experiment on behalf of the Ministry ; and though mechanized farms are in being, on which it is unlikely that a Government department will improve, the experiment would be valuable if only for the public attention it would attract. My own feeling is that, though a department or a County Council would, in practice, always be inferior to a good individual farmer, nevertheless the only chance of reclaiming these huge chalk and clay districts, of southern and midland England, from the prairie they become and of preventing further degeneration, is for the public authority to take a hand. The collapse of the old system of tenure is written on the face of the county as clearly almost as that relapse of the land itself.
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