Abstract
LESS than a generation ago farming and farmers made very small figures in the public eye; men of affairs, when they gave the subject a thought, regarded British agriculture as a dying craft, something that had ceased to pay and might be left to extinguish itself quietly, leaving the country for the recreation of the town-dweller, to provide sport for the rich industrial, health and the gratification of his aesthetic tastes for the employee. Business men paused sometimes to make pharisaical remarks about the wastefulness of the farmer; men of science scolded him for sticking to his old ways, not adventuring his substance on the crude generalisations which were put forward to represent the infinitely complex life of animals and plants; the politician had no use for the agriculturist, whose vote he knew was safe in the landlords' pockets; and the journalist saw little but comic copy to be got out of Hodge and its ways. As Sir Horace Plunkett said in his British Association address, modern civilisation has joined the rural exodus.
The State and the Farmer.
By Prof. L. H. Bailey. Pp. xii + 177. (New York: The Macmillan Co.; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1908.) Price 5s.
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The State and the Farmer . Nature 81, 157–158 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/081157a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/081157a0
