Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
A leave on one side for a moment various features of the operations
which will be indispensable but subsidiary to the City Colony, such as
the Rescue Homes for Lost Women, the Retreats for Inebriates, the Homes
for Discharged Prisoners, the Enquiry Office for the Discovery of Lost
Friends and Relatives, and the Advice Bureau, which will, in time,
become an institution that will be invaluable as a poor man's Tribune.
All these and other suggestions for saving the lost and helping the
poor, although they form essential elements of the City Colony, will be
better dealt with after I have explained the relation which the Farm
Colony will occupy to the City Colony, and set forth the way in which
the former will act as a feeder to the Colony Over sea.
I have already described how I propose to deal, in the first case, with
the mass of surplus labour which will infallibly accumulate on our
hands as soon as the Shelters are more extensively established and in
good working order. But I fully recognise that when all has been done
that can be done in the direction of disposing of the unhired men and
women of the town, there will still remain many whom you can neither
employ in the Household Salvage Brigade, nor for whom employers,
be they registered never so carefully, can be found. What, then, must
be done with them? The answer to that question seems to me obvious.
They must go upon the land!
The land is the source of all food; only by the application of labour
can the land be made fully productive. There is any amount of waste
land in the world, not far away in distant Continents, next door to the
North Pole, but here at our very doors. Have you ever calculated,
for instance, the square miles of unused land which fringe the sides of
all our railroads? No doubt some embankments are of material that
would baffle the cultivating skill at a Chinese or the careful
husbandry of a Swiss mountaineer; but these are exceptions. When other
people talk of reclaiming Salisbury Plain, or of cultivating the bare
moorlands of the bleak North, I think of the hundreds of square miles
of land that lie in long ribbons on the side of each of our railways,
upon which, without any cost for cartage, innumerable tons of City
manure could be shot down, and the crops of which could be carried at
once to the nearest market without any but the initial cost of heaping
into convenient trucks. These railway embankments constitute a vast
estate, capable of growing fruit enough to supply all the jam that
Crosse and Blackwell ever boiled. In almost every county in England
are vacant farms, and, in still greater numbers, farms but a quarter
cultivated, which only need the application of an industrious
population working with due incentive to produce twice, thrice,
and four times as much as they yield to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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