§ 11

If wages reach an extravagant sum, capital will not find the money to pay them. Again, who then will suffer? Labour, of course. These are truisms, but, being so, have they reached the ears and minds of Labour? Trades union leaders keep from the sheep they drive the knowledge of the butcher’s knife; they only tell their dupes what they (ignorant of the first laws of political economy) wish to hear. They flatter them with the hope that capital will finally be in their hands, that they are to govern the country, which is only to move while it drags the chariot of Labour. Our workmen are not prepared to rule, they are not mentally equipped to do so; their outlook, at present, is far too narrow. They see in government good only when it legislates for the advantage of their class, forgetting that there are other and equally important classes to be considered. And when speaking of Labour there is only one which appears to dominate in their minds, Industrialism as separate from Agriculture. The spread of Industrialism has pushed Agriculture aside; it has done even more, it has destroyed it in many parts of England. Agriculture must take precedence of Industrialism if we are to live on our own produce. The war ought to have taught us that, but has it? I have lived long enough to have seen the agriculture of our dear country productive and the people, relatively to now, content; when squalor was a far rarer spectacle than now. In great cities, alas, it must always be, for cities are artificial monstrosities where both wealth and poverty thrive in extremes, where idlers congregate and vice expands. But in country towns of reasonable dimensions and villages squalor had no abiding place when agriculture was the employment of the majority before the Juggernaut of Industrialism had begun its disastrous progress. There was work for all on the land.