We Shall Starve —Because We Have Scorned The Land

For all people who consider the English land as something more important than just a place to romp in at week-end there is a new book,* written by Viscount Lymington.
It is a distnrbing book which deals with the actual relationship today between the Land, and the national life. There is not very much relationship and because of this the future holds some terrifying probabilities.
Lord Lymington considers the subject from the double aspect of safety in war and the preservation of a race he holds to be still worth saving, whose best elements he finds in the working-men and artisans. . He writes: " If one considers the neglected fields and the teeming population of these islands, a starving nation is no fantastic vision but an ever-present possibility."
Imported Food
He points out that we rely on imported foodstuffs to the value of a million pounds a day and that these reach us over no less than 85,000 miles of trade routes. Many of our necessary foods come over a distance of 11,000 miles and, if European sources of supply were stopped—as they well might be in another war---our nearest source is across the Atlantic.
Our fighting forces will have to protect these long and vulnerable lines of communication instead of attacking and destroying the enemy thereby prolonging the war with disastrous consequences.
A healthy agriculture means healthy food and therefore healthy bodies. Our over-industrialised, over-urbanised population does not realise that home-grown food cannot be produced quickly. A factory on a peace basis may be turned almost over-night to one producing munitions; not so agriculture. Fields unfilled, land poisoned by disuse or misuse, derelict acres, require years to regain their lost fertility. The processes of nature cannot be hastened by an Act of Parliament.
Real Workers Needed *
The land demands highly skilled and diversified labour and this too cannot be improvised—even if the man-power existed. It is, one should add, dangerously misleading to speak of agriculture as an industry as this word arouses false ideas in the minds of town-bred people.
Turning t41,t4e. problem in more general terms, the author advocates small-hold jog and is greatly opposed to large-scale farming especially with one crop, for it it financially lucrative, but eventually ruinous to the soil. He praises the French Canadian peasants' system of farming where "a peasant population by wise mixed farming
has for two hundred years kept the land in sound heart. . ."
Ile is no enthusiast for machinery as it not only displaces labour but loses for the land valuable animal manures which no artificial fertilisers can replace.
For Love of the Land
Work in the country • should , be undertaken for its own sake and not be a mere adjunct to town-life with its false values and often worthless amenities.
To none Of this would a Catholic disagree. The following statement, however, could not be accepted without qualifications: " The body is older than the mind in our inheritance, and therefore. while the mind often reacts on the body, it is the These views, appears to hold to the fallacy of the superiority of a mythical Nordic race which " was the begetter of Western civilisation and achievement even in the halcyon days of body which reacts always on the mind." It is regrettable that Lord Lymington however, do not affect the main thesis of the book which is that we inDat return to a proper balatfee between
, •
culture itself there must be a proper balance between all its varied elements even though such a policy would involve the " Is of some shipping trade, some international dividends, some displacement of usurers' trade."—V. L. P. FOWICE.
>I." Famine. in England:".by_Viscount Lyming