Land, Sport and Life

Extract

Among recent books, one of the most thoughtful and helpful, I venture to think, is Mr. Joseph Clayton’s Economics for Christians f wherein I find this striking passage : ‘F irst things must come first in a wise economy, and therefore the economist explains that the first thing to be done is to make use in the fullest way of the resources of land, that storehouse of wealth. Without access to the land, man is starved. Hence for example when there are thousands seeking employment on the land and vast areas are uncultivated, it is peculiarly wasteful to forbid labour from working on the land’ (p. 7). This, surely, is the A B C of economics and at the same time a brief and clear indication of England’s temporal problem. And yet if there is one point on which the political parties agree, it is in ignoring this fundamental truth. In very deed the land is desolate, and we look in vain among publicists for those who consider in their heart. It has happened before, and the warning was little regarded then as now. May we not say that it is a recurring phenomenon in the course of Empire? That of Rome is the best known example. ‘At the same period, the country places witnessed the gradual disappearance of the independent labourer, the very seed and stock of a sovereign people. Lands formerly divided into small holdings, fell finally into the hands of a few lords; the cultivated plains give place to the immense pasture-lands which still occupy the environs of Rome and exhaust its resources.’