It is to the Moloch of an industrial civilisation that this sacrifice of life has been made. The desolation was wrought because men, in their haste to become rich, were blind to the true values of labour. They forgot that the primary work of man is to produce food, and that upon the production of food the whole structure of the commonwealth depends. Cities endure because, far beyond their ken, the land yields wheat and fruit and supports wandering herds. All other work is parasitic; that work alone is essential. But a perverted civilisation sacrificed the primary to the parasitic, and poured its rewards into the lap of the workers who added nothing to the world's true riches. The road to success and honour lay only through the city. Formerly the gentleman was he who tilled the ground; in our day the man who ploughs and reaps {59} is deemed a boor. Clean hands and clean linen are now the badges of a gentleman. The sense of the dignity of making the soil yield its riches has vanished from among us. Everything is ordered that the stream of life from the fields and the open sky into the barracks of sooty, squalid cities may swell into an ever-increasing river. We had only one ideal and that was cheap food. Other nations carefully conserved the workers of the soil and protected them from a competition that might deprive them of the reward of their labour. During the last fifty years, while our population has rapidly increased, our agricultural population has been diminished by a million workers. A hundred years ago we had 9,000,000 acres producing wheat, to-day we have only 1,800,000 wheat-growing acres. We have indeed sacrificed our true life. In the whole of the British Empire, covering a quarter of the globe, the total white population living on the land is only 13,000,000, whilst that of Germany alone, working the land and {60} living by it, has risen to 20,000,000. We had one watchword which stirred our blood--the cheap loaf! The meaning of the watchword was hid from us. For the cheap loaf meant cheap labour, and cheap labour meant ever-increasing riches to the exploiters of toiling masses in the lamp-lit cities. But the 'cheap loaf' meant for the country places which yielded it, that the husbandman could not live by his labour. Floods of oratory were poured forth; under the guise of philanthropy the ideal of cheap food was held up in palpitating periods by capitalists who reaped their sure reward in labour correspondingly cheap, and the fields of England were steadily laid down to 'twitch and thistle.' A generation wrought this desolation, unconscious of the desolation that it wrought. The agricultural labourer became at last obsessed by the watchword which wrought his ruin. Even Mr. Masterman records with sympathy, if not with satisfaction, the attitude of the farm labourer to the new 'fiscal reform.' {61} 'Oh dear!' is his comment, 'we want no taxes on food.' We destroyed him, but we did it