Natural Countrymen An idea of this nature, if practically administered
in a suitable place (and very many places are suitable), has a number of ancillary advantages beside the provision of wealth in the form of cheaper food of a good quality. The most important thing is that the men have a part-time occupation and shake off the monotonous gloom that is the worst punish- ment inflicted by unemployment. Some, doubtless, will like the work more than others ; but it is the experience of most organisers of land work for non-rural workers that a good percentage develop a real zest for agricultural and horticul- tural work. The speed with which all sorts of unlikely people become specialists has astonished especially those who have founded and equipped both the communal and individual farming communities in Palestine, a much k S 3 green and happy land than Wales or England. There is just one acre of cultivable land to every head of population in our island ; and this quaint fact of statistics helps to emphasise one's belief in the truth that it is the most proper task of man (whatever the excesses of the principle of division of labour) to produce some portion, at any rate, of the food he cats.
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