Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
Every man who goes to our Farm Colony does so, not to acquire his
fortune, but to obtain a knowledge of an occupation and that mastery of
his tools which will enable him to play his part in the battle of life.
He will be provided with a cheap uniform, which we shall find no
difficulty in rigging up from the old clothes of London, and it will go
hardly with us, and we shall have worse luck than the ordinary market
gardener, if we do not succeed in making sufficient profit to pay all
the expenses of the concern, and leave something over for the
maintenance of the hopelessly incompetent, and those who, to put it
roughly, are not worth their keep.
Every person in the Farm Colony will be taught the elementary lesson of
obedience, and will be instructed in the needful arts of husbandry,
or some other method of earning his bread. The Agricultural Section
will learn the lesson of the seasons and of the best kind of seeds and
plants. Those belonging to this Section will learn how to hedge and
ditch, how to make roads and build bridges, and generally to subdue the
earth and make it yield to him the riches which it never withholds from
the industrious and skilful workman. But the Farm Colony, any more
than the City Colony, although an abiding institution, will not provide
permanently for those with whom we have to deal. It is a Training
School for Emigrants, a place where those indispensably practical
lessons are given which will enable the Colonists to know their way
about and to feel themselves at home wherever there is land to till,
stock to rear, and harvests to reap. We shall rely greatly for the
peace and prosperity of the Colony upon the sense of brotherhood which
will be universal in it from the highest to the lowest. While there
will be no systematic wage-paying there will be some sort of rewards
and remuneration for honest industry, which will be stored up, for his
benefit, as afterwards explained. They will in the main work each for
all, and, therefore, the needs of all will be supplied, and any
overplus will go to make the bridge over which any poor fellow may
escape from the horrible pit and the miry clay from which they
themselves have been rescued.
The dulness and deadness of country life, especially in the Colonies,
leads many men to prefer a life of hardship and privation in a City
slum. But in our Colony they would be near to each other, and would
enjoy the advantages of country life and the association and
companionship of life in town.
SECTION 2.--THE INDUSTRIAL VILLAGE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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