THE PLIGHT OF THE LAND.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LI, Issue 16869, 26 October 1925, Page 9

THE PLIGHT OF THE LAND.

VANISHING VILLAGES. ENGLISH RUIN AND DANISH PROSPERITY. (By William Beach Thomas in London Observer.). . Our Minister of Agriculture, who has relumed from the hub of farming prosperity in Denmark, should complete his education, and ours, by a visit to the ex-village of-Snap, Snape* or Woolscud, in this England. The cause that have produced the contrast in these two neighbor countries matter supremely to our civilisation. No one yet has quite clearly or quite persuasively explained how it is that the,land of England perishes and the laud of Denmark nourishes. 1 propose to give an exact descriptive picture of two wholly characteristic farms—one in England, one in Denmark. They uill lie extremes. After all, the most salient fact in English economic and social life is the diminishing return from the land, just as the crucial fact of Dauish civilisation is the growing income from the land. THE VILLAGE OF SNA PE. In the very heart of England, in a district rich in Saxon and pre-Saxon iclics, lies a village that is in the last stages of decay. It reminds me of a deserted mining camp,in Australia. In the village proper no house is left. The little church has clean vanished, and its place is wholly occupied with a close crop of docks, very full of ripe reeds. Their rod-brown color suggests a surface of rust, a comparison very suitable to the scene. Small bits of the ruin of the ,-hicf farmhouse poke out of the nettles, like the ribs of a wrecked ship from the sand. The round stone bases of the last eornstack arc discoverable among thistles, nettles, and brambles. No one has thought it worth while even to salve the relics. It seemed to me once in the war that the eomplctcst symbol of the destructiveness of war was the disappearance of a road. After a famous action I walked across the reach where the Gordou-Bennctt trials used to take place, near to Lc Transloy. and could not so much as discover where the road had been. ’ Its deep foundations, its careful enclosures —all were dean gone, leaving no trace whatever. Roads arc disappearing unite as completely in Wiltshire from mere ueglest.

“TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.”, By a lucky chance I met the shepherd on the crown of the hill. With altogether unconscious drama he waved his hand towards the prospect, and said, “Twenty-five years ago that was all corn.” What is it now in this excellent harvest year? It is mostly thistles. The whole area, when the ploughs left, collapsed into so-called grass. Home few really tine Shorthorn cattle vanished into the thistles where they lay down. The wind was carrying a snowstroni of seed for miles, spreading the malady. We talk of land falling back to prairie value. 'Phi’s has fallen much below prairie value. The weeds that belong to cultivation arje an active enemy. They do rot permit neglected acres to remain at their prairie value. The cost of the land to buy would scarcely exceed the cost of cleaning it. What attempts there were to arrest the decay made it more pitiful. One squatter is to be seen* near by living in an old railway carriage and farming poultry among the .weeds. He looks over one of the loveliest views in this England. DWINDLING POPULATION.

Such is the neighborhood of Shape or Woolscud, between Marlborough and Swindon. It would be superfluous to paint in further details. The hamlet is already becoming a place of pilgrimage for students of our’ rural decay. You sec there in exaggerated form what is happening in most English counties. In Huntingdonshire, the village of Groat Gidding, with apologies for the adjective, lias lost •100 inhabitants within the coutury. Tho whole county, outside the few towns, has been losing population for qOO years, but it lias never decayed so rapidly as now. Again, in a Hertfordshire parish, very familiar to me, iioUi at ter field has. relapsed to grass. Not one per cent, of |!ic villagers is up agricultural laborer. You can buy excellent farm land in Buckinghamshire for £l3O nu acre. It is about twenty miles from much the best market iu the world, and soil and climate are good for intensive cultivation. Fifty miles further north I was present, at a sale where good land, iu a parish famous in-literature, sold for uothing. In other words, the £ll3 nu acre for which it was bought was less than the value of the houses on it. The trees in two l.iaguilieent avenues were’almost worth the inoucy.

Snap. Suape, or Wojolbeud is :i typo, [i is no' exception. Its nlin is due to general, if not to fumlaineulal. causes. Wo have been losing nearly 8000 farm laborers a year. If,we take it that four'moil can cultivate 100. acres (tbo old figure was live), this means that 200.000 acres a year fall out of close cultivation, t More direct' statistical figures are of little use, because some farmers are destroying their laud by attempting to use one man to 100 arable acres. Their fields are losing fortilitv even more surely than the fields ‘registered as changing from arable to.-grass. Besides this, a recent calculation puts gt a -round million the land that could be made profitable by proper drainage. -We lost yearly just about as much as the. Germans acquire yearly by reclamation. Wo surrender; t.liev reclaim. We increase our yearly rood bill, till it promises to reach the fantastic total ot £400,000,1)00. They become nearly self-sufficing; and .Ben mark, of course, lives on its exports of agricultural produce. Our whole system of land tenure has broken down.' The country-up to the very suburbs of Loudon is populated with ‘‘white elephants,” i with yie empty houses of departed landowners v.ho have no successors..■’.When you inquire into rents, you come upohwoefuj Onru.s pointing to the .same .essential evil. The rents t-for the arable land have fallen, in sonic cases down tb 10s an acre. The rents for grass laud have risen; but what has risen most is the tent for cottages.' The ouiy members of- the community who cannot pay 10 live in them, unless they arc old, dark, and lonky, arc the agricultural lubor- . These are the facts., Let them stand tor the,moment without inferences., for the sake of putting them side by side, with the civilisation of a Brinish \il lil'ge. ‘‘Great is."juxtaposition. ’■ ’