purchase and to encourage the provision and equipment of small holdings is advocated. The constructive policy also includes the improvement of educational opportunities for farmer and labourer, of rural transport, and subsidiary measures to assist the marketing of agricultural produce, the improvement of agricultural land, the provision of labourers' cottages, and the development of rural industries. Above all, it is urged that an agricultural policy must be permanent; its essential aim must be the provision and maintenance over a definite period of a reasonably stable and profitable market for produce. This is, of course, the key to the whole agricultural problem; the industry must be got on to an economic basis. By this means alone can fair profits and living wages be ensured for those engaged in it, together with security and a reasonable return for the landowners' capital. Increased production from the land, and improved conditions in the countryside, will inevitably follow.

These, then, are the considerations which are submitted to those who hold that the existing system of land tenure in England is doomed, and must be replaced by State ownership-evidence that men are still prepared to shoulder the obligations of a landowner, suggestions that these obligations may be made less onerous and more effective, and definite proposals for assistance by the State to maintain the existing system. It is believed that this statement of the case for preserving the system will-in the main-represent the views of the agricultural community. The criticism which is anticipated from those with personal experience of the subject is that we knew all this already.' The case is not presented for them, but for that section of the public which is interested in the land and its problems, without practical experience of either. And those who pin their faith to the existing system must feel that their faith in it is based on something more substantial than mere argument. The system of landlord and tenant in this country is an organic growth, evolved with many vicissitudes through six hundred years of history. This is made clear in Lord Ernle's account of the slow transition from collectivism to individualism in the occupation of Vol. 246.-No. 487,

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land. First the 13th-century Manor, not very different from the Manor of Domesday Book, with its various tenures and joint cultivation of the arable land. Then the Manor of the Tudor period, when the land was becoming impoverished under the old methods of cropping, and the difficulty was met by converting arable to grass and enclosing, and breaking up fresh ground. This was followed by the improvement in agricultural methods which marked the 17th and 18th centuries, and brought about the second period of enclosures. Then came the demand for a further increase of agricultural produce in the 19th century, to meet the requirements of an industrial population, with the result that farming changed from a subsistence to a trade. The mediæval lord of the Manor with his freehold and copyhold tenants, the latter cultivating in common and performing certain labour services for their lord, have after six hundred years been replaced by the squire and half a dozen tenant farmers, each farming upwards of two hundred acres. And the process is not complete. The squire can no longer face the post-war taxation and death duties, and has reluctantly sold two of the outlying farms, on easy terms, to the sitting tenants, and disposed of the Manor House and the remainder of the estate to a wealthy business man who is prepared-with a little encouragement-to retire from business and to enter on a new career as a landowner.

This is the moment suggested for uprooting the growth of centuries, and substituting State ownership of the whole by Act of Parliament. But a close consideration of Lord Ernle's historical sketch, and reflexion on its lessons in the light of personal experience of the land and of the people who live by the land, make it impossible to believe that either the land or its people can be dealt with in this way. Agricultural methods and practices cannot be revolutionised by Act of Parliament. Slowly and surely the agricultural community must work out its own salvation. The immediate problem which confronts it, though this is too often ignored by reformers, is primarily economic. There is at present a scanty margin, and sometimes no margin at all, between

'The Land and its People,' chaps. i-v.

the high cost of production and the low prices obtainable for the produce. The industry is, in too many instances, producing at a loss. Where this is so, it is useless to call for fresh capital, or increased credit facilities-the probable effect will be to increase the losses of the producer. Nor is it particularly helpful to advocate the agricultural methods of other countries, where the essential conditions are different, or a change of system which has no bearing on the root of the matter. Landlords, tenants, and labourers as a rule have no illusions-their efforts are concentrated on the vital problem of 'making the farm pay!' And though all agriculturists are pessimists in their conversation, they are incurable optimists at heart. If they are given fair play and the same assistance as other industries, and if all reformers will remember that the present test of any measure of reform is whether it will directly or indirectly increase the margin between the cost of production and the price of the produce, they will solve the problem for themselves, as they have done in the past.

G. T. HUTCHINSON,

Art. 11.-PROHIBITION.

The Prohibition Situation. The Department of Research and Education of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. New York, 1925.

MUCH has been written about the prohibition of fermented and distilled beverages in the United States; but nothing so noteworthy, and nothing which has proved so sensational in the country of its origin, has been produced as is the Bulletin on the Prohibition Situation issued by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. This body represents just those elements in the religious life of the United States which helped the Anti-Saloon League in its campaign for Prohibition; and it was therefore a matter of assumption that any publication on the question issued under its auspices would be a whole-hearted defence of the prohibitionist experiment. The assumption has proved wrong. Notwithstanding that those responsible for the Bulletin make a gallant effort to range themselves on the prohibitionist side, notwithstanding that every page is written from the standpoint of men who regard Prohibition as a proper and even laudable form of legislation, their work turns out in fact to be a deadly criticism.

Before coming to the Council's survey of the present position it may be useful to recall the genesis of American prohibition. The decree of 'nation-wide Prohibition' at the end of 1919 was the fruit of many years of agitation. The title of Father of Prohibition has been conferred upon the famous Neal Dow, who founded the Maine Temperance Union in 1837. In 1843 the era of Prohibition began with a prohibitory law in Oregon, which, however, only remained on the statute book for five years. In 1846 a similar law was enacted in Maine, was repealed in 1856, and re-enacted in 1858. About this time Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont also experimented with Prohibition, though in some of these States it was either abandoned after a year or two or immediately vetoed. We must guard, therefore, against assuming that prohibition in America is an absolutely new thing. It was soon found, however, that the easiest

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road to State prohibition was the parochial form of it known as local option, or local veto. Kansas, for example, began with the milder form in 1866; in 1880 che it adopted full prohibition by way of a constitutional amendment. Other States-North Dakota and Iowaduring the second half of the 19th century made essays in Prohibition, and yet others-Georgia and Oklahomaing in the early years of the present century. By 1914 nine States had adopted Prohibition. By 1918 the number had grown to twenty-three out of forty-eight States. Then war-time prohibition over the whole Republic came into operation on June 30, 1919. But, apart from the operation of this last-named temporary measure, it was possible in the Prohibition States to get the prohibited beverages by buying them from outside the State; and therefore, so long as any State remained free, prohibition was shorn of its completeness.

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So we find a movement for forcing the whole Republic into prohibition, as far back as 1869, by the founding in Chicago in that year of a National Prohibition Party. But the body which rightly claims the chief credit for the enactment of 'nation-wide' prohibition is the AntiSaloon League, which came into being in 1893, its somewhat obscure place of origin being the town of Oberlin in Ohio. This body began an agitation for an amendment of the Federal Constitution which would make the consumption of alcoholic beverages an offence against the Constitution. Written Constitutions are condemned as inelastic; but that of the United States, at any rate, is not as the laws of the Medes and Persians. From the beginning it provided, in its fifth Article, for possible amendments. If two-thirds of both Houses of Congress deem it necessary, or the legislatures of two-thirds of the several States make application for an amendment of the Constitution, Congress must call a convention, and if the proposed amendment is ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States, or by conventions in three-fourths of them, the amendment is incorporated in the Constitution. Seventeen such amendments had been made when the Anti-Saloon League demanded an eighteenth.

The amendment proposed was daring in a constitutional view, for a Constitution is properly concerned