THE MIND BEHIND THE PLOUGH. - 1 - 1NGLISH village life is very
dull ; that, at any rate, is the A 11 verdict of those young men and women who crowd into the towns and who are willing to put up with almost any degree of squalor in their surroundings in order to live under urban social conditions. Sweet fields, pure air, the joy of country sunshine and the peace of country darkness are as nothing to them in comparison. Can rural social conditions be so changed as to render village life attractive enough to stem this exodus ? The Village Club Asscciation, the report of whose conference lies before us at the present moment, believes that it can. The various speakers maintain different points cf view, but they all agree that some common centre of village life is at present the crying need of rural England. If this need could be satisfied a great deal of happiness and a great deal of dignity would be added, we think, to our national life. There is something of humiliation in the thought that the English people are deserting the soil. Four-fifths of our people (we quote these figures from the speech Sir Henry Raw, K.C.B., made at the conference we are speaking of) now live under urban conditions ; a good many of the remaining fifth go daily into the towns for their work. It is to the countryman that we look for specially national characteristics. The life of every great city is, in a sense, cosmopolitan. The Cockney is a person of wonderfully good nature, great courage, and some wit, but it would be somehow a blow to our national prestige if he were to be universally regarded as our representative, if other countries regarded the typical Englishman not as John Bull, the conven- tionalized figure of the farmer, but as the conventional Cockney. The best and cleverest boys and girls desert to the towns not because they prefer town work, but because they prefer town leisure. It is hardly to be wondered at, for at present the leisure hews of the hand-workers in the country are .mostly empty. The countryman goes mentally hungry. His wages are now sufficient to give him a high standard of physical life. The man behind the plough is well fed, but the mind behind the plough is famished, and agriculture suffers not only for want of enough hands, but for want of good heads to direct them. The farm labourer demands to be put upon "a higher level of efficiency and reward." Reward in the sense of wages he has got, but a man wants more than money : he wants the amenities of life. The soldiers returned to the land are deeply discontented, and those who remained at home to keep the country in bread are no longer willing to accept their old of no-account position in the country. They desire, or the best of them desire, those advantages with which a community can provide itself but an individual cannot.
The idea of a village club. is obviously no new thing. Many were set up before the war, and many have failed. The chief reason of this failure is, in the belief of Mr. Nugent Harris (the chief organizer of the Village Clubs Association and the mcst interesting of the speakers reported), due to their cribbed, °shined, and confined surroundings. The experiment was not made upon a scale which gave it any chance of success. "It is impossible to develop the real club atmosphere, let alone the community spirit," in such places. In the Final Report of the Committee of Adult Education set up by the Ministry of Recon- struction the following words occur : "The State cannot create a new social spirit, but it can provide opportunities for its growth and expression. One of the chief of these opportunities is the village institute, and we can think of no more profound and far- reaching piece of rural reconstruction than the provision .of buildings expressly designed as a focus of the special activities of village communities." The same Committee go on to suggest that such building schemes should be subsidized by Government, and makes what we feel sure will seem to our readers an extrava, gant proposition as to the scale upon whioh this should be accom- plished. The Government should, they think, give, "as demand arises, to Parish or Rural District Councils through the County Councils in respect of capital expenditure amounting to ninety per cent. of the total cost. The remaining tan per cent, to be raised locally." Encouraged by this opinion, the Village Clubs Association approached the Government with a view to getting disused Army huts handed over to properly constituted bodies representing village communities to serve as temporary club premises. The reply of the Government was, we are given to understand, " disappointing " ; nevertheless, in some instances such huts have been obtained. We are told of a village in Shrop- shire which has raised money to buy a large hut at a cost of five hundred pounds ; it will cost a thousand pounds to transport, re-erect, and equip it. Fifteen hundred pounds is a large sum, but, judging by the papers before us, it does not seem very difficult to raise money in villages at the moment. The labourer is better off than he has ever been ; the farmer is more anxious to please him, and neither the one nor the other has the habit of extravagance or the means of frittering away income such as present themselves at every step to the town- dweller. From Lancashire, again, comes an account of a village of only 450 inhabitants which has already raised £1,000 towards the erection of a village institute which is to comprise a women's reading-room and women's sewing-room, a stage and green- rooms, a large room for a men's club with full-sized billiard- table, hot and. cold baths, oentral heating, and a shelter for bicycles. All this the inhabitants have every hope of shortly seeing completed. A smallholder of thirty acres has given the land, and a bowling-green has already been started. Such a club as this represents, we imagine, the desideratum of the Village Club Association, though one of the speakers whose words we have quoted desires much more—a cinema show, a library, and lectures.
All our readers who care for village life ought to make them- selves acquainted with this scheme as it is set forth by its inaugurators. A few criticisms will, we think, occur to them all; but obviously every scheme of rural improvement would require essential modifications according to the various counties in which it was tried. Throughout the speeches we have read it seems to be taken for granted that farmers and labourers will make use of the same club, and the speakers also deprecate any idea of a club in any sense run from above, if we may be permitted the expression. We cannot help thinking that the " class " question will prove a difficulty even in these demo- cratic days. It is not unnatural that employers and employed who see quite enough of one another at work should like to spend their leisure separately. It is also pretty certain that young people of the different strata of society will not be content to play together unless the objection to their inter-marriage should pass away. We think also that while a club might easily be wrecked by the too-officious if well-meaning interference of the richer members of the community, it is not unnatural nor undesirable that those with most leisure and most money should bear the heaviest part of the initial burden of work and expense. If they do so, it will be exceedingly difficult to prevent them from having too much say in the management. If their help is altogether declined, the whole thing in many places will inevitably fall through. These, however, are matters which oall for adjustment, and much might be done to make the immunity of one mind by the holding of classes and the giving of lectures on subjects, notably agriculture, of a nature to interest every one—every one, that is, from the richest to the poorest who has a more direct interest in the speeding of the plough than that which comes of his desire for a cheap loaf.
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