Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
I have not yet referred to the female side of our operations,
but have reserved them for another chapter. It is necessary, however,
to bring them in here in order to explain that employment will be
created for women as well as men. Fruit farming affords a great
opening for female labour, and it will indeed be a change as from
Tophet to the Garden of Eden when the poor lost girls on the
streets of London exchange the pavements of Piccadilly for the
strawberry Beds of Essex or Kent.
Not only will vegetables and fruit of every description be raised,
but I think that a great deal might be done in the smaller adjuncts of
the Farm.
It is quite certain that amongst the mass of people with whom we have
to deal there will be a residual remnant of persons to some extent
mentally infirm or physically incapacitated from engaging in the harder
toils. For these people it is necessary to find work, and I think
there would be a good field for their benumbed energies in looking
after rabbits, feeding poultry, minding bees, and, in short doing all
those little odd jobs about a place which must be attended to,
but which will not repay the labour of able-bodied men.
One advantage of the cosmopolitan nature of the Army is that we have
Officers in almost every country in the world. When this Scheme is
well on the way every Salvation Officer in every I and will have it
imposed upon him as one of the duties of his calling to keep his eyes
open for every useful notion and every conceivable contrivance for
increasing the yield of the soil and utilising the employment of waste
labour. By this means I hope that there will not be an idea in the
world which will not be made available for our Scheme. If an Officer
in Sweden can give us practical hints as to how they manage food
kitchens for the people, or an Officer in the South of France can
explain how the peasants are able to rear eggs and poultry not only for
their own use, but so as to be able to export them by the million to
England; if a Sergeant in Belgium understands how it is that the rabbit
farmers there can feed and fatten and supply our market with millions
of rabbits we shall have him over, tap his brains, and set him to work
to benefit our people.
By the establishment of this Farm Colony we should create a great
school of technical agricultural education. It would be a Working
Men's Agricultural University, training people for the life which they
would have to lead in the new countries they will go forth to colonise
and possess.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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