VILLAGE INDUSTRIES AND INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES.
LTO THE EDITOR OF THE " $PECTATOR:1 Sra,—The letter in your last number on this subject comes from too influential a quarter not to make us desire that your corre- spondent's mistaken impression should be corrected. Pray allow me, therefore, to point out that, whether our "schemes be "magnificent" or humble, we have certainly never contem- plated "building model villages, and then finding out how the people who are to inhabit them are to live." On the contrary,. the niodus vivendi, the ways and means by which the inhabitants of industrial villages are to earn their livelihood, lie at the very basis of our plan of operations,—which might, indeed, be evident from the very title we have proposed for them. If the Editor of the British, Trade journal would spare time to look at the prospectus and the first " Occasional Papers" (copies of which were sent to him some little time ago), he would see that the cultivation of the land by peasant proprietors, either in allotments or co-operative farming, combined with various domestic industries, and in conjunction with village factories or workshops, is an essential feature in our scheme. We wish to see the homes of the inhabitants of the village comfortable and healthy, with sufficient decent - accommoda- tion; but we should of course be more ready to promote the introduction of those industries into any existing villages where the requisite conditions for health, morality, and happiness already existed, than in the first instance to get new villages built.
All the other measures we advocate, such as adequate pro- vision for recreation, both indoors and out, for local self-govern- ment and corporate life, with due precautions against sub- letting, subdividing, &c., are simply the necessary means for securing both the well-being of the workers and the permanent success of the village industries. Your correspondent would rightly charge us with "beginning at the wrong end." if we were doing what he supposes. Happily a little examination of our programme would show him that the reverse is the fact.
His other reason against "creating model village communi- ties," viz., "the peculiar condition of the land market in Eng- land," it might be supposed, would tell forcibly the other way. When land in almost any county can be bought at less than half the price it would have fetched a few years ago, surely it must be a favourable opportunity for putting the industrial population and their friends in possession of land, whether for peasant farms, dwellings, workshops, recreation grounds, "'model
villages," or "industrial communities." Our council think your correspondent ought to join them. I wish he would.—I am,
Previous page
