At a' meeting held at Shrewsbury on Saturday last Lord
Selborne specially appealed to agriculturists to do their utmost to increase food production. He had recently seen a woman ploughing in Surrey, a sight which he believed nobody had ever seen in England before, but which was common enough on the Continent, and served to illustrate the straits to which farmers were put. "You say," said Lord Selborne in conclusion, "that it is no good going to the women and asking them to work on the land. I do not believe it. Lord Kitchener told me the other day that there was nothing he had done in making his New Armies which a dozen people of the first authority had not told him was impossible. Well, I ask you to do the impossible." Lord Selborne's advice is excellent, but he is wrong in thinking that the sight of a woman ploughing is unprecedented. Some thirty years ago a charming poem in English elegiacs on a girl turned ploughman was written by the late Mr. A. J. Munby, who was not only a poet, but a close observer of rural life. Why should not this female epic of the plough be republished? It would be most opportune.
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