In view of the great complexity of the land question, the variety of the causes that have led to the depression of agriculture, and the difficulty of forecasting accurately what would be the result of the adoption of any particular reform by any one nation, considered apart from the rest, vegetarians will do wisely in not claiming too much for the system they advocate. But at least it must be admitted that vegetarianism would tend to bring about, in some form or other, that much-desired _return to the land_, which, in the present congested state of our cities and busy centres, is felt to be the best hope of stanching a dangerous wound. The town is at present draining the life of the country, and the tide of emigration is still further sapping the national strength; but if men's thoughts could be turned back from commerce to agriculture, if a healthy love of the soil, of fruit-growing, of market-gardening, could be substituted for the insane thirst for the feverish atmosphere of the town, it is evident that a great step would have been taken towards the cure of the disease. "If the towns renounced flesh-eating," says Professor Newman, "we should see in a single generation, even without improved land-tenure, a tide of migration set the other way—from towns into the country. Rustic industry would be immensely developed. All motive for the expatriation of our robustest youth would, for a long time yet, be removed, and the country might be enormously enriched, not in an upper stratum of great fortunes, but down to the bottom of the community."[42] Footnote 42: "Essays on Diet," p. 55. So, too, Max Nordau, in some notable passages of his _Conventional Lies of our Civilisation_: "If the soil of Europe were cultivated like that of Belgium, it could support a population of 1,950 millions much more completely and abundantly than the 360 millions it now supports so poorly.... Cultivation of the soil is the despised child of our civilisation. It hardly takes one forward stride where manufacture takes a hundred.... Experience teaches us that man's labour as a general thing can nowhere be employed in a more lucrative way than in agriculture. If a man should work over his field with the shovel and spade instead of the plough, he would find that a plot of ground of incredibly small size would be sufficient to support him."