BOY-POWER AND SOLDIER-POWER. T HOUGH much is being done to bring
into cultivation the land which is worth cultivating at short notice, no one who goes through our rural districts, and pays attention to the talk of those who know, can doubt that there is still a great deal of land unploughed which might be ploughed and made to bear corn and oats, barley and potatoes. The reason why this land is not being used is that there is not a sufficiency of labour. All the labour apparently available, male and female, is now at work on the land ; but there is still land over. To allow such a state of things, in view of food shortage, is a great disaster. There are two large sources of labour which have not yet been adequately tapped. The first of these is boy labour. Boys who might be at work in the fields arc now bending over their desks, poring over problems instead of ploughing, studying instead of sowing, taking down from dictation instead of digging. We would put these boys to work on the land. But here we must distinguish. We do not propose, for the present at any rate, that the boys of the elementary schools should even temporarily abandon their literary education. We say " literary " advisedly, for we will not admit that working on the land would not per se have a great educational value. Again, we do not refer to the boys at private boarding-schools. The boys we are thinking of are those at our big Public Schools, boys from over thirteen to seventeen or even eighteen. If one takes all the secondary schools in the country, from Eton to the ordinary county town grammar school, the amount of boy-power that might be used for the land which is not now being used is very great.
First let us put our proposal in specific form, and then deal with the essential objections which can be raised against it. We do not propose that the boys, save in exceptional cases, should be returned to their homes, because, though we think boy labour may be made extremely efficient, as a rule it will only reach that point when carefully organized and supervised by those whom the school- boy is accustomed to obey—his own masters. What we suggest is that after the Easter holidays, when the boys go back, they shall go back, not to making Latin verses or construing Xenophon or Homer, Aeschylus or Thucydides, but to working on the land. Some of them would be employed, as has already been done in a good many schools, on special fields put apart for their tillage, and others on the land of neighbouring farmers. And here, in order to make use of existing machinery, we suggest that the O.T.C. organization should be employed—the only difference being that the whole of the school should be put into the corps. This means that a certain number of junior boys should be added to each platoon so as to make the organization for agricultural purposes as wide as the school. Care would of course be taken that no boy who was not fit to do agricultural work should be put upon such work, any more than he is now allowed to play cricket or football or racquets if he has a weak heart or weak lungs. Almost all our big Public Schools are, like Eton, Rugby, Marlborough, Charterhouse, or Wellington, in the middle of agricultural districts. That being so, farmers would be told that if they wanted a field weeded, or a special crop earthed up or dug over with the spade, or any other special work suitable to gang labour performed, they should apply to the officer commanding the school corps, who would then send over a platoon or half-company, or whatever might be the number required to do the work.
Curiously enough, there is nothing new in this scheme. We believe that some thirty years ago it was very common in the Eastern Counties, and in other parts of the country given over to arable, for gangs of about twenty boys, under the control and leadership of a ganger, to undertake various forms of farm work. The ganger, who controlled, organized, and paid the gang, agreed with the farmer to accomplish a particular job at a particular price. The present writer was talking only the other day to a gardener who as a boy had been in one of these gangs. He gave the impression that the system could be carried out without any hardship to the boys. He depicted his own great pleasure and interest in earning wages for the first time.—Here we may interpolate that wages should be paid, and the proceeds, after all expenses had been paid, given to the boys, who would most probably hand them over to a war charity. The ganger of a Public School platoon would of course be a master, or in the case of a half or quarter gang a Sixth Form boy or monitor. In many cases the boys could walk to their work carrying their food with them. In others they might use the railways, or be conveyed in brakes or chars-h-bancs. Occasionally they might, as happens on manoeuvres, have to sleep away for a night or a couple of nights while they cleaned up a farm or got in a crop of hay. In hay-making the power to apply quickly a great body of labour often means the salvation of the crop. Nothing is more disheartening than for three or four men to try to save the hay in a big meadow when they see by all the signs that the weather is going to break. If, however—granted the hay is dry—forty or fifty people with rakes can get at it and put it together, the crop may be saved in five or six hours. A striking example of what gang labour can do was recounted the other day in the newspapers. Incredible as it sounds, a farmer determined to use a hopfield for growing corn. He obtained the loan of a battalion, some six or seven hundred strong, from a neighbouring camp. The soldiers, headed by their band, marched down to the field, cleared it of hop-poles and stacked them at the side of the field. Before the day was out the ploughs had come on to the ground and the furrows were being turned. If the thing had had to be done by four or five men, it would have taken a month or more, and this might well have meant no crops for this year I It is not, however, in the least necessary to expatiate on the advantages of gang labour. They leap to the eye. We shall be told, no doubt, that food is not everything (there are some people who will not believe in famine because they have never experienced it), and that it is a wicked thing to deprive boys of education even in time of war. Our answer to that is, first of all, the answer hinted at above—i.e., that education is of many kinds, and that we can imagine none better than that which goes with sacrificing ease in the service of the nation. Next, we can, on purely practical grounds, imagine nothing better for the boys of the richer classes than learning what field labour really is like, and learning it side by side with the ordinary rural labourer. Another objection will possibly run as follows : If your plan is adopted, the majority of parents will say that they cannot pay high fees to have their boys taught, not to read the classics, but to till the land, and will withdraw them, with the result that the poorer Public Schools will be ruined.' Our reply is : Even if this is true, it is better that these schools should be ruined than anything left undone which can be done to produce food.' As a matter of fact, however, we doubt if many parents would act as suggested. We do not propose that the boys should work in the autumn half. They would after the harvest had been got in return to Horace and Homer and the Latin and Greek grammars.
Now as to soldier-power. We believe there is a good deal of waste here. We quite admit that the first object of a soldier, we had almost said the only object, is to fight the enemy, and that nothing must be allowed to deflect him from this object. The longer the war lasts, the greater the shortage of food. Therefore shortening the war by combatant action may be regarded as equivalent to the most rapid form of food-growing. The problem, however, is not so simple as that. There are, we are convinced, a good many 'areas in which soldier-power could be used without interfering with the soldier's training, because the soldier is already trained. In certain parts of Great Britain, and much more so in Ireland, there are large bodies of men whose training is com- pleted, and who are merely standing to their arms in case they may be called upon to do combatant work at home. Further, these men, and again this is especially true of Ireland, live on land which has near it considerable tracts of grass which were originally taken for Government purposes, but which at present are not being used in that way. Now we venture to say that, taking them together, it will be found that there are several thousand acres in and around the Irish camps which could be cultivated without any loss of military efficiency. The men are there, and, what is more, the horses are there, and the drivers and the ploughmen. Take a camp of ten thousand men around which there are five hundred acres of Government land, some in large bits and some in scraps, which are capable of growing cereals and potatoes. The labour necessary to work such land, if drawn from a body of ten thousand men, would never be missed. If a dozen or so men were seconded for the work of planning and directing, the manual labour could be provided by each half-company in the camp—a half-company seldom num- bers more than a hundred effectives—allotting one man per diem to agricultural work. We suggest oats and potatoes as crops, because these are the two things for which there is a perpetual demand in camps. If they are grown on the spot, neither men, nor horses and carts, nor steam, nor petrol are wasted in carting them about. Unless we are mistaken, even in camps where the men are not already trained, and therefore where every hour is needed to make them efficient, our demand for one per cent. per half-company per diem would prove enough to cultivate the immediate area of the camps. Remember that in a camp the question of fertilization is largely got over. The manure from the horses and camp refuse generally, if judiciously used, will provide excellent fertilizing material.
When it comes to a question of saving hay crops or potato crops, and most of all the wheat crop, even training might properly go by the board for three or four days. But if this is to be done, the military authorities ought to look ahead and lay their plans. We suggest that they should be asked to think out a scheme by which, if there were special need owing to bad weather conditions, they could save the hay crop or the harvest by throwing in a large amount of military labour. If the thing is done without thought and in a hurry, then it is sure to be badly done. If it is planned beforehand, and done soldier fashion, terrible waste may be avoided.
Lest perhaps some of our readers may think we are neglectful of woman-power on the land, we ought perhaps to say that that is being dealt with so thoroughly already, just as is ordinary man-power, that we need not trouble about it. As for girl-power, wherever that can be used without injury to the girls' health, all the arguments in favour of boy-power apply. There is nothing we should like better than to see the pupils of a girls' High School turned out to save Farmer Giles's hay.
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