ILL FARES THE LAND”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20013, 2 December 1927, Page 11

ILL FARES THE LAND”

HASTENING ILLS A VISION OF ENGLAND. LONDON, Nov. 22. Colonel John Buchan, M.P., speaking at the opening of the produce exhibition at Oxford Town Hall, organised by the Oxfordshire Federation of Women’s Institutes, said that everywhere land was slipping out of cultivation, and if it continued, they would see a new England, and it would not be a better England. “I look forward without any comfort,” he said, “to a picture of the future wher there is a chain of great overgrown cities connected by tramways and motor roads with nothing much except prairie in between. There is a good deal that the Government could do, especially in removing the unfair handicaps on agriculture, but I do not want to see the Govern ment do too much in the way of actual farming. I don’t want to see agriculture made a branch of tho Civil Service.” The women’s institutes, Colonel Buchan continued, had done a great deal to promote co-operation among women in the countryside, and to revive tae old rural community life. The success of the institutes was one of the most encouraging things in the land* to-day, and was largely due to the cleverness of women in matters of small detai?. “I do not wish to discourage my own sex, but if genius consists of an infinite capacity for taking pains I am inclines to think there may be more of that rare commodity among women than among men,” he added.