A Committee of the Land Union, at 15 Lower Grosvenor
Place, S.W., has issued a report on The Present Condition of Agriculture and Some of the Causes Thereof, which is most painful reading. The Committee gives details of the unprecedented fall in the wholesale—though not the retail—prices of all farm produce and shows how the farmer, the labourer and the landowner are all suffering from the market depression and from the over- whelming pressure of rates and taxes and of railway charges. The account of the way in which Death Duties and Income Tax are making landowners insolvent deserves attention. The Committee proposes some modest measures of relief " to stave off the disaster which threatens agriculture and through it the whole community." One very practical suggestion is that the unemployed should be set to work in digging chalk which might be supplied at low rates to farmers for top-dressing the land.
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