MAKING A COUNTRY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 32, 7 February 1934, Page 6

MAKING A COUNTRY.

VIRTUES OF THE PEASANT.

(•By AGRICOLA.)

Until the inevitable aftermath of war left them in the lurch and, at least partially, opened their eyes, the ruling powers in most countries complacently ignored (if they were ever really cognisant of) the prime and fundamental national importance of the countryside. Easy trading made easy living. Everybody was stepping on the gas and accelerating" the velocity of money. The country was a novel, almost a quaint, place to view from the cushioned seat of a motor car or a motor charabanc. People were sometimes eccentric enough to spend a holiday there and secretly pity while openly patronising the farmer. The country was no place in which to make money, or even spend it, except grudgingly.

Such was England at any rate: England with its tradition of yeomen and the land, stretching back to the dawn of its history. Yet it was the same England that, with a tithe of its present population, preferred sheep to produce because it was easier and more paying to deal in fleeces for Flanders. And now England, is waking up to the fact, after a thousand yeans of haphazardry, that all her countryside needs is cultivation. A thousand years!" Think of it! Adversity is bringing home the lesson. often preached in vain by far-seeing and truly patriotic citizens for generations. Trade may be an easy way of making money, but the true "making" of a country lies not in its mine/, and furnaces, its factories and its fleets, but in the land and the men who live on and by it.

People who are jealous of New Zealand's obvious destiny are both amazed and indignant at her apparent neglect to direct her energies to the full development of her soil. Our land should be producing not only butterfat and wool but a race that has its roots deep within it. We have started with the wrong type of psychology. Just as we have 'got into the bad habit of using superlatives about everything in our country, so we have developed the idea that in order to be a success every thing must he on a large scale. We have endeavoured to prove ourselves right by loading our lands with debt. Money is looked on as" a good substitute for work. Even the land now in use is not producing a quarter, perhaps a fifth, of its capabilities. We have cattle, but our country is a desert so far as human beings are concerned. We have large unoccupied areas within our cities' boundaries; but we have no source of recruitment from which to draw the virility which keeps a city's population revitalised.

As I have said, we have cultivated the wrong sort of psychology. It is not in one or two cases only that I have been told by urban workers that* in being urged to go and work small areas in the country they are being asked to come down to the level of peasants! I have lived for the better part of two generations and have had a good average experience of life. As a "child of the soil" I have deliberately got into touch with the peasant in any country I visited, and I have no hesitation in saying that the peasant is. not only a happier man, a more uscflul man, but an infinitely better man than the super-magnate who rides around in a Rolls Eoycc. It is the peasant who makes a country in the final analysis. His sons and daughters work their way upward when their abilities tend that war and constantly reinforce the classes through which they make their way. If this is possible in places where "classes" are still recognised, how much easier it is here under at least a nominal universal equality. The fact is that there is really only a pretence at equality here. Men, and particularly women, often assert it through a sense of jealousy and conscious inferiority. They represent a rather common weakness in this country, where expressed intention is not infrequently expected to be taken as accomplished fact. These people could not be peasants, for the peasant is too bu.sy making his country prosperous by his labour to bother about the pretensions of others, and ho is too honest to himself to mortgage his dignity by pretending to be something or somebody which his shrewdness tells him . would imperil his independence.