A WAY OF LIFE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23687, 20 December 1938, Page 12

A WAY OF LIFE

A great many people who actively desire to "preserve the English countryside" are town dwellers, and do not deeply understand the thing that they wish to preserve (says the Sunday Times). Professor Stapledon'« was a helpful reminder, when he told a conference at Chester that it is the soul, and not merely the shell, of country life that needs preserving—that the problem includes one of psychology. Farming in the past has always been conceived, not merely as one industry among others, but as a distinctive way of life, valuable to a nation on that ground. Similarly the village has stood for a particular and intimate form of human community. An ever-accumulating band of influences has long been weakening this. Centralised education. centralised shopping, buses, films', ribbon development, the sprawling of the towns into the country, and the suction of countrymen into the towns, have all combined to destroy the old unities and effact the od quiet ideals. Even the rehousing of recent years, though desirable and overdue in itself, has helped to convert villages with a personality into suburbs without one. Save on increasingly parasitic terms, it will become more and more difficult for agriculture to survive in these conditions.