Economics and Sentiment
This half-mystical approach to the country scene 'may enrage many contemporaries, who are impatient of any discussion, or any activity, that does not further the urgent need of our over-populated island. The Government, the economists, and the food-prophets are deafening us with admonition about the danger of starvation, and the loudest of the jeremiads predict an inevitable world-wide shortage of food thdkmust, in the end, bring down the human race from its overweaning ascendency over fur, fin, feather and carapace. Such fear frightens us out of our humanitarian well-wishing for society. We are tempted to believe that only war and pestilence can keep mankind to a balanced relation with the earth that is our temporary environment. It is a horrible conception, based upon statistics. Thank heaven that statistics, like scientific data, are a shifting evidence always being modified by unexpected changes of circumstance. But whether we be weeping or laughing philosophers, it is well to start our rural meditations for 1951, or any future year, with the recollection, borrowed from Oliver Gold- smith, that
"A time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man."
That suggests a somewhat Gallic re-disposition of our British acres; but it may be necessary as a preventive against "bare back and side," and an invasion of the farms by hunger-maddened townsfolk.
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