BRITAIN'S WET SUMMER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 30 November 1927, Page 10

BRITAIN'S WET SUMMER

"The long operative forces hostile to British farming, which received a passing check from the war, haye sanco resumed their full rigour. The weather of this year has given their slow attrition a climax of abrupt disaster," says the London "Observer." "Its onset has no parallel unless in the memorable '79, or in that earlier season which 'rained away the Corn Laws.' The ravages of flood and tempest are stupendous. Many a crop has sustained not merely damage, but obliteration. The labour of a whole season has been washed away, and the Husbandman' left with bare hands. It is a 'tragedv that will throw a host of cultivators bankrupt, leave auuch soil derelict, is still worse-—strike despair deep into the hearts of a whole community.' If it were not recognised now that the plight of agriculture has become a matter of national urgency, it would endorse the most cynical views of political psychology. 'lndividuals,' said Dean Inge (he other day, 'sometimes'rise above selfishness; classes never.' If that should be truly applicable to the townsman's view of agricultural debaclo, it would give social pessimism the most deadly of incentives. Conventional altruism roams the whole earth in quest of proteges. Here is full occupation for it in a landscape of calamity affecting possibly an eighth of our own countrymen."