power brought within reasonable bounds.' That is strong language, but the man who called Carnage God's daughter' was no mincer of phrases. He was a poet, and he need not be interpreted as if he were writing a scientific treatise. But he meant, and all that is wisest and strongest in England means to-day, that we ought not to think of resting till our work is done and the liberties of Europe are no longer in danger.

The second thing on which he insisted was hope:

'Hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays,

For its own honour, on man's suffering heart.'

'I began with hope,' he said in 1808, and hope has inwardly accompanied me to the end.' And so in the Tract on Cintra :

'There is a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead; the good, the brave, the wise of all ages. We would not be rejected from this community; and therefore do we hope. We look forward with erect mind, thinking and feeling; it is an obligation of duty; take away the sense of it, and the moral being would die within us' (pp. 187-8).

His is no cheap or easy optimism :

'We know the arduous strife, the eternal laws
To which the triumph of all good is given,

High sacrifice and labour without pause
Even to the death.'

So his Happy Warrior is

'doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed,'

and the people of England, as he sees them, are ready, without fear or flinching, to be

'left alone,

The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.'

And indeed he and his England had a harder task to face in that duty of hope than we have. Instead of standing alone, as they often did, we have more than half Europe with us. We have seen no mutinies of the Navy, as they saw; where they saw some of their greatest men

openly sympathising with the enemy, we have had the supreme blessing of a united nation. Those who have been reading the very interesting correspondence of Lord Granville Leveson Gower just given us by Lady Granville will have been struck at once with horror and with a thankful sense of contrast. Then, even so late as 1813, people like Lord Holland were wishing for French victories; to-day not even our obscurest cranks wish success to the Germans. 'In Britain is one breath,' said Wordsworth, seeing the ideal Britain and not the real. But what was not true then is true to-day. After a moment's hesitation the whole nation rallied to the great call; and one of the most distinguished of the Liberals, who had hesitated during the critical days of decision and publicly expressed his hesitation, could write to a friend a fortnight later, after the Belgian crime, and find Wordsworth's 'In Britain is one breath' the inevitable phrase in which to declare his recognition of the war as a war of justice, and the national cause as the cause of liberty and right. He and thousands of others would not have felt as they did and would not have thought of going to Wordsworth to utter what they felt, if they had not seen this war, as Wordsworth saw that of his day, as a struggle with the powers of darkness. Belgium opened their eyes. And the very blankness of her desolation, the utter and visible failure of all material means to avert her ruin, made them turn, like Wordsworth, to a deeper, a more inward consolation, at once a faith, a vision, and a call to arms; made them say to Belgium and to all who had died or were to die for her and for the cause which she sanctified by her martyrdom :

"Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;

There's not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies:

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind.'

JOHN BAILEY.

Art. 8.-SOLDIERS AND SAILORS ON THE LAND.

1. Part I of the Final Report of the Departmental Committee to consider the Settlement or Employment on the Land in England and Wales of Discharged Soldiers and Sailors. [Cd. 8182.] Wyman, 1916.

2. Agriculture after the War. By A. D. Hall. Murray, 1916. 3. Farm Work for Discharged Soldiers. By Harold E. Moore. King, 1916.

4. The Ex-Soldier, by Himself. By W. G. Clifford (late R.A.). Black, 1916.

THE Departmental Committee on Land Settlement for soldiers and sailors has reported in favour of a system of cooperative colonies; and, at the time of writing, a Bill is before Parliament to carry their recommendations into effect. The Committee suggests three types of settlement, distinguished by the various branches of the agricultural industry for which they will be respectively organised. One is to be for fruit and market gardening; 1 another for dairying; a third for mixed farming. The first two types have been already tried. But the lastnamed is really a new and an interesting experiment. If a cooperative colony of small-holders can successfully compete with a well-organised large farm in the cheap production of bread and meat, one reasonable and indeed formidable objection to the extension of the small-holding movement will be removed. But to make the experiment of any value in this direction it must be strictly conducted on business lines. Colonists and tenant-farmers must be working under the same conditions, or the test will be unfair. The Committee very wisely makes a modest beginning. For the establishment of one of each of the three types of colonies 5000 acres of land are required. Those soldiers or sailors who have been already accustomed to agricultural work will be settled at once upon holdings in their own occupation within the colony; those who have had little or no previous experience will be trained by working at weekly wages. Each colony is to be managed by a resident director; and expert advice, guidance, and instruction are provided by agricultural or horticultural instructors.

The Government proposal strongly appeals to public

sympathies. Everyone wishes to recognise the inestimable value of the services which our sailors and soldiers have rendered to the nation. Yet a note of warning must be sounded. The present writer has had considerable experience in the working of small holdings, both on a private estate and as a member of a Committee of a County Council which has been active in putting into force the Act of 1908. In his opinion, the utmost care should be taken to study the serious questions involved in the creation of small-holding colonies, before any wide extension is given to the movement. It ought, for instance, to be decided whether cooperative farms of small-holders can be made such efficient instruments for the production of bread and meat as a large farm of the existing type in individual hands. If that question is decided in the negative, then the extent to which the nation can afford to divert good land from the production of its supply of staple foods must also be considered in the light of the present war. These two instances serve to illustrate the gravity of the problems which have to be solved, and the necessity of approaching them without any of the prejudices which have been engendered by years of political strife. In fact, at this crisis of our national development, the most effective as well as the cheapest land-reform, which human wisdom could devise, would be the exclusion of agriculture from the region of party politics.

These reflections naturally arise from the mention of a subject which has been so fiercely fought as Small Holdings. Practical men know that it is impossible in any direction to generalise to any useful extent on such a subject. But it is precisely through wide generalisations, deduced from insufficient particulars, that politicians and social reformers most often go astray. Because small holdings sometimes, and in some places, succeed, they will not necessarily succeed always and everywhere. If all the land of the country were cut up into small isolated occupations, the gross production of all kinds of food would not be increased; on the contrary, we should have to buy from the foreigner larger quantities of bread and meat. There is no magic in size, great or small. It is economically best to have holdings of all sizes, from the allotment to the large farm; one size is

best for one kind of produce, another for another. Certain qualities of land are adapted to small holdings; other qualities are so inappropriate as so inappropriate as to spell the ruin of the small occupier. Even where the land is suitable, it does not follow that, because one man has succeeded, there is room for another to succeed in the same parish.

All small holdings are not well cultivated, nor are all large farms well farmed, and vice versa. The produce per acre raised from the one cannot be fairly compared with the produce raised from the other, unless due allowance is made for the fact that the small holding consists of good or fair land, well-situated, while the large farm always contains a proportion of unproductive land, which can only be worked in conjunction with good land and could not be worked at all as a small holding. The nearest approach that can be made to any general principle is to say that there are certain conditions on which the economic success of the small holder most often depends. The land must be suitable in quality— either good in itself, or easily worked and responsive to fertilisers and enjoy convenient access to a market; and the prices of the produce raised must be remunerative. Even then the personal element must be taken into account. More important even than the size or situation of the holding is the holder, or, more correctly, the holder and his wife.

Practical considerations like these illustrate the danger, from an agricultural point of view, of generalising about small holdings. Except in a limited range of produce, small holdings in the hands of individuals rarely afford a better livelihood to the occupier than the earnings of an agricultural labourer; and the remuneration is often more uncertain. The converse is also sometimes true. If a man has other sources of income, a small holding is an admirable supplement to his means of living. But, as a rule, a small holding is rather a good crutch than a good leg. Much is made by the politician of the advantages of ownership over tenancy; they bulk largely in rural programmes at the time of an election. The small holder himself is less concerned with the question. What he generally wants is to be secure in his occupation, to pay as little for it as possible, to be