The Paradoxical Farmer
As a class farmers resemble sailors. The same struggle against the weather and a single incalculable element makes them fatalists. They are invariably hard-headed and super- stitious, practical and sentimental. From both, today, comes the urgent cry for subsidies. In these hard times for agricul- ture it is interesting, therefore, to see a perfect example of the English farmer's contradictory make-up. It stands on the London to Folkestone road; a piece of plain memorial stone carefully fenced by the sort of iron fence invariably employed by water-works. Standing just inside a field, it is approached by a concrete path. The stone bears an inscription, but of the tens of thousands of motorists who pass every week not one in ten thousand ever stops to read it. This monument is, in fact, a memorial erected by local farmers to their late Mem- ber of Parliament. As something completely useless, point- less and uninspired it could hardly be bettered. Its cost, contributed largely by a district which protests that tithes are mining it, must have been some hundreds of pounds. Yet the local hospital, five miles distant, is crying out for beds.
* * * *
Previous page
