COLLECTIVISM URGED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 31 December 1940, Page 6

COLLECTIVISM URGED

G.B.S. ON FARMING The adoption of the principles of collectivism in British agriculture is urged by Mr George Bernard Shaw in a letter to The Times.” ‘ Why is our system impossible?” Mr Shaw asks. "The answer is so obvious that no one notices it. We leave the whole vital business to individual farmers without the smallest inquiry into their qualifications. We expect each farmer to be able singlehanded not only to plough and hoe, to reap and sow, but to be an agricultural chemist, a veterinary biologist, an accountant dealing with complicated costings, a statistician, a man of business skilled in buying material*, and selling products, an up-to-date reader of Lord Bledisloe. and the scientific Investigators. and an expert in half a dozen other capacities utterly foreign to his antecedents And his mere reaping and sowing keeps him working in his shirtsleeves for 16 hours a day to pay his rent and mortgage interest besides keeping himself and his family fed. clothed and lodged. Our makeshift ag. (cultural committees, with the best intentions, can do little but provoke our farmers to resort to their shotguns by infuriating them with instructions which are sometimes idyllic and sometirros only a gratification of that craze for authority which is characteristic of oeople who are ignorant and stupid er. .ugh to seek it for its own sake How sh mid we fare in war if we depended for our weapons on village blacksmiths and for our explosives on local chemists?’