English Husbandry

Extract

Of all goods which can be privately owned, none is more conformable to the teaching of Rerum Novarum than the land, the plot of earth on which the family lives and from ihe fruits of which, wholly or in part, it draws its livelihood. . . Only the stability which has its roots in the land privately owned, makes the family tne most perfect and fertile living cell of society, causing as it does a coherent continuity between present and future.’—Pius XII., Whitsuntide, 1941.

For one whose training has been mainly historical, to review two books on the land might seem a misapplication of industry. But, as John Selden said, ‘most men’s learning is nothing but history duly taken up ‘; and it is their historical grasp of what agriculture has meant and must mean to civilization that Tenders Sir George Stapledon’s work and Mr. Rolf Gardiner’s important. England to whom agriculture has come to signify merely an industry with a snag in it—the least effective of all the many extant methods of exploiting humanity—must listen to such men or die. Their ‘history duly taken up ‘allies them to that of many papal pronouncements, which they—more than any English Catholics, except a handful of Distributists—have done their best to implement.

Sir George Stapledon, whose reclamation of grass-lands is world-famous, has found time to become one of the land’s foremost evangelists. He now annotates and enlarges on the agricultural programme of one of England’s most far-sighted statesmen. That Disraeli was never in a position to carry out the land policy he urged, was a national disaster which Disraeli and the New Age bewails and explains. The policy, however, is there to be reconstructed. And that is where Sir George Stapledon comes in.