Less obvious but not less certain is the connection between all these problems and the decline of our agriculture. It is the decline of agriculture which has driven into the towns the masses of unskilled labour with which we have to deal. Indeed the Liberals foresaw and deliberately planned this, when, first by the Poor Law and afterwards by the Repeal of the Corn Laws, they drove labour off the land in order to obtain it cheaply in the great industrial centres. And that is how the situation has worked out, so that it is important, no less in the interest of the town proletariat than in that of the country, that we should re-organise the first and most necessary of our staple industries. The idea apparently entertained in some Liberal circles that this can be done by the taxation of land values is, as Mr. Brougham Villiers has pointed out in “The Opportunity of Liberalism” (not altogether I should suppose to the gratification of his Liberal friends), on the face of it absurd. The end at which we are aiming is not that the state should own the ground rents but that it should own the land and the capital used to develop it, and it is towards this end that our policy should be directed. To this end we want an energetic system of state aid to farmers such as that already inaugurated by Sir Horace Plunkett and others in Ireland. We want loans to farmers on state security and experiments in cooperative farming under state supervision and with state encouragement; we want increased powers for local authorities in rural districts to buy and develop land; above all we want light railways, cheap and rapid transit, an agricultural parcels post (as proposed by Mr. Rider Haggard); and finally we want an end put to the monstrous system whereby Railway Companies charge higher rates to British than to foreign producers. When this policy has been fairly tried we shall see whether we also want a protective tariff. We do not want a tariff which will merely raise the landlord’s rent, but, as I have already pointed out, Socialists have no theoretic bias against such a tariff if it can be shown to be necessary to the public interest.