There is nothing particularly elevating about farm work, in spite of Corydon and other shepherds described by the town bred makers of fantasies. Sheep are the most unpleasant creatures to look after, the dirtiest and the stupidest. Their scab, fluke, ticks and footrot need much attention. Apart from their diseases, the scene of the shepherd’s happy labours will be in winter a turnip field, the crop being eaten off by sheep. The dirt and squalor of the dung and the animals and the turnips, the cold and damp, the sleet and the mud and the smells--these things are not good subjects for poetry. The farmer’s calling is to make his living out of the death of his animals, and out of their sufferings when alive, their castration and imprisonment, and their labour. He measures them by a purely economic test. It is not for us who live on meat and milk, butter and cheese, and the products of the pig-sty, to blame farmers for this. They do it for us. But it is not particularly “improving”; it approaches the calling of the butcher, which is equally necessary. Why the world is thus built is not, luckily for me, the subject of this book. The rest of the labours of the farm are a struggle with the earth--with weeds and with weather. It is all primitive and built into the bone and marrow of the race; but it is not more moralizing, nor more romantic, in practice than working at looms or ledgers. The labourer does not go to the land as to a leisurely summer home. Hitherto, no way has been found in England for inducing young people to stay in the villages. We ought to try to succeed in this. If we do it will be in a new kind of village, and it will be effected by cheap and rapid transit, and by widely scattering the ownership or holding of land. Then Ruskin’s aims will be realized, but not by the only methods he could see in his day. In fact, railways and domestic machinery would be essential. Division of Labour goes with the factory system. It was early hailed as one of the great economies obtained by production on a large scale. It was found that by constantly keeping a man or a child to one occupation, an extraordinary degree of sure accuracy and readiness was obtained. Without the necessity for thinking, and so without risk of thinking wrong, the nimble fingers repeated hour by hour their appointed trick, the practised eye ever followed the same mechanism and stopped it at the same point, the same tool in the same place was ready to the same hand. Physiologically we believe that all this means that there is established a rut for the tracks of the brain wheels, a habitual nervous connection between certain sensory centres and certain motor centres, without the need for every piece of news to be transmitted by the sensory centre to the central thinking apparatus in the cerebrum, and a corresponding order sent down from the central control to the motor centre.