It is well known that the delegates to the Labour
Party Conference are townsmen almost to a man. The party provided a Minister of Agriculture from its intelligentsia, but the ordinary member, who consumes imported wheat, potatoes and bacon, though his wife may refuse chilled meat from overseas if she can get " prime English killed," knows very little about British agriculture. He knows that his baby's milk may be-held up by a railway strike; but not how or whence it comes to a country station ; niangolds perhaps. he associates with an implement which he, like Mr. Mantalini, may be required to turn ; his jam he may trace to a factory, but no nearer to Mother Earth. He is-equally vague about a farmer's security of tenure and about the number of different kinds of skilled labour, in connexion with horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, milk, hay, corn, roots and hedges, to which an agricultural labourer • can turn his hand in contrast to the narrow work of the specialized work of the townsman. Hence agriculture was a fine subject for Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Mr. E. F. Wise to parade at Margate, for they had an audience with perfectly " open " minds.
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