wasteland; such a work must be left to private enterprise. Instead of extending, we should resolutely restrict the State to those functions which properly belong to it. "Experience always proves that Government cannot conduct ordinary business so well as private individuals, and all sound and cool thinkers have for long urged the exclusion of the State from the sphere of private industry. The nationalisation of the land would overturn every sound principle that nations have painfully learned by experience; and it is truly humiliating to all lovers of progress to see old fallacies of the crudest kind again raising their heads, as if mankind must for ever revolve in a vicious circle of error. . . .

"It seems perfectly clear to me that the position of farmers would be far worse under a national system than under one of private ownership. There could be no abatement of rent in bad seasons, nor permission of arrears to stand over, but a hard and rigid system of merciless precision must prevail. . . . Think of over a million farmers in Great Britain and Ireland holding direct from the State, and at the mercy of a Government department. Would no pressure be put upon them at election times? Would no permission to abate rents be given as the price of their support? Would not this huge State department become what all similar departments have become in the United States-a hotbed of bribery? We know that, with every change of Government in America, more than 100,000 officials are turned out, from the President of the United States down to the humblest letter carrier. Would it be safe, as our Government becomes increasingly democratic, to place at its mercy so vast an interest as the agriculture of the United Kingdom?