poetry and science, and of a higher level of life and thought to glorify ordinary work-a-day existence. This and the power of hard physical exercise to develop a sane mind in a disciplined body are brought home to peasants' sons and daughters, in association on equal terms, at the most impressionable period of their lives.

But it is ill preaching the higher life to a man who may feel that he and his are less we'l nourished than they might be, whose home may be such as to minister to no sense of personal dignity, whose outlook may afford him small promise of that self-respect and measure of independence, when his physical powers shall fail him, which is the right of every hardworking life. There must be a material basis for rural enlightenment. The Danes are certainly in no doubt about that. In the first place they put the land in the hands of those who can and will do their duty by it. Then comes education. After that, mutual aid and all rural progress.

Let us turn back to the Danish peasant, a man in adequate control of his land and reasonably well educated. He had turned his attention to dairy-farming, following the example of the larger land-holders, and he often made very good butter. When at the International Dairy Show in London in 1879, a Danish estate gained the first prize for salt butter from all countries, it was a Danish peasant, as Mr Harald Faber, the admirable Danish Agricultural Commissioner in London, is fond of reminding us, who took second prize. But the peasant farm which had won the second prize for a product of practically equal value with that which had gained the first prize could not obtain the same price as the 'gentleman farm.' The reason was that the estate had 120 cows and the peasant farm had only half-a-dozen. The estate could therefore maintain not only an average quality but offer a considerable weight of butter. Before long the peasants of one Danish parish had decided to bring the milk of their 400 cows to one place and make their butter together, so placing their product on a level with estate butter. Within six years as many as 300 other co-operative dairies were built. Now there are nearly 1200, and the big estates are glad to join them. Buttermaking, as the tall chimney shafts of the perfectly equipped, white-walled creameries which dot the Danish

landscape suggest, is now a highly developed industry. In a year co-operative creameries make about 2,500,000 tons of milk into about 94,000 tons of butter, worth 10,700,000l. The milk of 83 per cent. of the cows in the country is delivered to co-operative creameries. There are 1177 co-operative creameries to 328 joint stock ones. Danish butter is a standard product that may only be exported under a Government brand which guarantees that it is made from pasteurised cream, containing less than 16 per cent. of water and no preservative other than salt. It is not only the law but pride in a national product of great excellence which has made the fortune of Danish butter. It is not a gentlemanlike thing,' said a peasant to the present writer, 'to cheat over butter or to water-pump milk.' 'A Dane,' said another speaker, 'may possibly fail in morals over a horse deal, or he may even murder his mother-in-law, but he may not adulterate butter'!

·

The development in bacon-making is as noteworthy as the progress with butter. Down to 1887 the farmers sent their pigs to Germany or to private bacon factories in their own country. But swine-fever broke out, and Germany closed her frontiers. The private bacon factories in Denmark thought to profit by offering very low prices for the non-affected pigs. The farmers replied with a co-operative bacon factory, started five years after the first co-operative creamery. There are now double as many co-operative bacon factories as joint stock ones; and co-operators kill four times as many pigs as private traders, or about 40,000 weekly. Only bacon which bears the Government brand in red, signifying complete freedom from tuberculosis, may be exported. Some 90 per cent. of Danish butter, bacon and eggs comes to the United Kingdom. This is Mrs Bull's little bill for a recent year:

The system on which the creameries and the factories and all sorts of other co-operative enterprises for providing seeds, artificials, implements, groceries and so on

are started is the same. A loan is obtained on the joint and several security of the shareholders; annual income provides working expenses and the repayment of the loan; the balance of profit is divided between the shareholders in proportion to the pigs, milk or eggs they have supplied or the goods they have bought; and the shareholders may not supply any other buyer than their society. They may be bound to their society for ten years, at the end of which time the liabilities are often practically paid off. So far as the adoption of the joint and several guarantee and the undertaking to send all the product to the co-operative society are concerned, some of our co-operative organisations in England-whence, by the way, the Danes originally had their co-operation-have still to rise to the Danish level. And the thoroughness of Danish co-operation is seen in the number of societies a Dane will join, for every branch of agricultural activity has its corresponding society.

An obvious result of membership of these societies is that it is unnecessary for the Danish farmer to spend time on 'going to market.' His buying and selling are done for him as a separate branch of rural industry, as separate as his butter and bacon manufacture. He is able to concentrate on the farmer's proper task, the cultivation of the land and the management of stock, work for which a good farmer may have much more aptitude than for 'dealing.' In the case of our own agriculture, it is a fault that the system of going to market once or twice a week tends to bring to the top in a district the clever dealer among the local farmers, rather than the ablest cultivator and cattle manager, or socially worthiest. No doubt home-staying farmers have ever homely wits; and, from this point of view, as Mr Edward Strutt once impressed on the writer, there is some justification in market-day. But the Danish farmer is more than compensated by the business training and the training in character he receives in the management of his many co-operative organisations. There is also the rich life of all the agencies for intellectual selfimprovement which have their centre in his village halls and in the people's high schools, the teaching of which has been well summed up as: 'Honour physical labour; know your trade well and put your brains into it; never

neglect your intellectual development.' The device of the school for small holders is an owl sitting on a spade.

Attention is frequently directed to the indebtedness of the Danish farmer. Mention should certainly be made of the credit associations which are so largely financing him and to the extent to which he avails himself of their assistance. There are co-operative land credit associations granting loans on first mortgage, and the mortgage loan societies granting cheap loans on second mortgage. In 1913, the amount of loans granted on first mortgage was 95,000,000l., or 12,500,000l. more than in 1910. The second mortgage associations' loans amounted to 1,100,000l. As many of the first mortgage organisations do not make a distinction in their reports between rural and urban loans, exact information does not seem to be available as to the amount of the rural land debt, but it is estimated at half. The second mortgage associations' loans are on rural properties only. In the case of the first-named associations the interest has been of late years rather above 4 per cent., while in the case of the second class of associations it has been from to 1 per cent. higher. Loans are granted up to 60 per cent. of the value of the property. In the case of farms. which were voluntarily sold between the years 1905-9, it was found that the loan averaged 50 per cent. On crofters' holdings it was about 34 per cent. The advances should rather be called loans than mortgages, for, so long as the interest is paid, they cannot be called in. Short or working loans to farmers are granted by about 170 short loan associations, which were started with a Government advance of 270,000l., on which 3 per cent. interest is paid. The associations may not charge more than 5 per cent., nor may a loan exceed 1667. or be for longer than nine months.

As to the extent to which the man on the land may have burdened himself with loans, in order to meet expenditure not wholly or at any rate not directly reproductive, there are differences of opinion in Denmark among people who are entitled to speak with some authority. It is not, therefore, for foreigners to form conclusions too readily. That the standard of living on the farms has risen very much is patent to any one who has had the advantage of paying casual visits to the

hospitable homesteads which dot the Danish landscape. But those who are coming to believe that the farmer all the world over is in need of learning not only to save but to spend will hesitate to judge too summarily the healthy, well-lighted rooms of the new houses, with their shiny furniture, their musical instruments, pictures and assemblages of books and papers. They will realise that the stimulus derived from self-respecting surroundings is an asset of no small value for rural civilisation.

No doubt, even in a thrifty country there will always be the thriftless. Not everyone who is able to come by the possession of land is the best sort of farmer or small holder. It can never be difficult to point to cases in which farmers have been injudicious in their expenditure or in which small holders have forgotten that the margin of profit on small plots must needs be small. But in debates on the actual cost of butter, as on the real indebtedness of the men of the land, the foreigner must be exceedingly cautious. He needs to possess fuller information than he can well hope to acquire. And, after all, he is not directly concerned in the domestic rural politics of another country. It is the question of how rural Denmark stands in relation to the rest of the world that is of most importance to him. It is the broad lessons of the policy she has adopted towards country life and industry that are of the greatest value. Every country has to work out its rural salvation according to its own conditions; and it will be enough for neighbours if, after taking account of the general results, they are able to approach with fresh confidence and quickened faith the solution of their own problems.

It is unnecessary, however, to go so far from our own shores as Denmark in order to be stimulated in the work of rural amelioration. Within the distance covered by a twenty-shilling second-class return fare from the Thames, is another country, the agricultural population of which is increasing. Since the accession of Queen Victoria, Holland, by means of the pump and the spade, has redeemed from her sea-shore, her meres and the morasses of her high moor an amazingly large acreage of land. Although only a third of the Netherlands would be flooded if the sea and river dikes