The absence of labourers in the most elemental and necessary.
of all industries, within a small island where well over - a million persons are unemployed, is a collocation of facts that may well stagger the logician. The district where personally I best remember the old " joy in harvest," the eager zest for gathering in the crop safely and quickly (as well as doubtless the greater zest for special harvest wages), is to-day a half-desert. One village has fallen from a popu- lation of 800 or so to 300 or so ; and the next from 180 to 90 or thereabouts. Yet in those days wheat was cheaper by a third than it is to-day ; and it was absolutely prohibited to do what the above advertisement permits : to sell the straw. off the place. It was needed to go back on the land to maintain fertility. The same sort Of thing is happening in some other co' untries, and a certain number of thoughtful persons predict a world's shortage of wheat within the next few years, owing to the general saute qui peul. I do not believe them ; but it may well be that the price of wheat may again make it worth growing in England, where after all we get vastly heavier yields than are dreamt of in the typical wheat-growing. areas of the world. In any case there is no need to despair of farming, even of wheat farming.
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