charges that Britain is avaricious and guided by sordid mercenary motives, all we Canadians can answer is that we know nothing about it. Our country has vast stores of great undeveloped natural resources awaiting captains of industry to turn them into money, yet our rich farms, mines, forests and fisheries have never been exploited by the English. Our preferential tariffs have been made by ourselves without English solicitation. During all these years, while we have gone our own way politically and commercially, the British navy protected our commerce to the ends of the earth, and for that protection we paid not one dollar.

After a century and a half of British rule, after our bitter experience with English avarice in trade and landgrabbing in general, we silently point to the Canadian graves in Flanders. Surely we are not hypnotised fools! No, but as an expression of our appreciation of the goodness of a Mother who has erred, if at all, on the side of leniency, and at the same time as a guarantee of the future continuance of the liberty and happiness which we have enjoyed under British democracy, greater we believe than we could have enjoyed as an independent nation or under another foreign power-for these reasons Canadians are going to the front and they will continue to go. They go not because Great Britain says they must, nor because they have any special hatred for the Germans, nor because the adventures of war have carried them off their feet. They go because it is the only honourable course to take in view of their present happy position in the Empire. But above all, they go because their filial love is so strong that they would regard it as a monstrous neglect of duty to stand aside and complacently look on while the Mother-Country fights for her life. They go for ideal and sentiment combined, both of which are grounded in their British loyalty. In the last analysis they go because Britain is at war, and because their interests are one with those of the Empire.

A CANADIAN.

Art. 2.-OUR AGRICULTURAL RIVALS.

1. Rural Denmark and its Lessons. By Sir H. Rider Haggard. London: Longmans, 1913.

2. Report of the British Consul in Copenhagen for 1912. 3. A Free Farmer in a Free State. By Home Counties.' London: Heinemann, 1912.

4. Agrarverfassung und Landwirtschaft in den Niederländen. By Dr J. Frost. Berlin: Carey, 1906.

5. Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium. By H. Seebohm Rowntree. Macmillan, 1911.

THE writer who narrates the agricultural history of the last half-century will chronicle few things more remarkable than the descent which has been made on Denmark by seekers after rural truth. Singly or in deputations, students of farming and of rural civilisation from Great Britain and Ireland, from all parts of the Continent, from the Colonies, the United States, South Africa, and Japan, may be met with any summer, laboriously examining the institutions, and collecting the ideas of a little country half the size of Scotland. In almost every recent English book on rural life and industry one may turn to the index with the certainty of finding a reference to Denmark; while in speeches and newspaper articles, since the development of the land controversy, allusions to Denmark have been constant. It is the same, if in a minor degree, with Holland and Belgium, so far as students of agricultural therapeutics from the United Kingdom are concerned.

Unfortunately, although the investigations have been numerous, they have often been untrustworthy. Few of the visitors have allowed themselves enough time; not many have had the gift of gathering information in a foreign country. Certainly, there is hardly a publication about rural Denmark which is altogether free from slips; in many cases, indeed, it is charitable to call them slips. Some visitors to Denmark have not gone thither with an open mind; they have carried with them a political axe to grind. Another drawback from which investigations in Denmark and Holland have suffered is seldom considered. Danish and Dutch rural industry being concentrated on the export trade, those who direct

it need to be reasonably well acquainted with English. It is to the care of these leading men that the visitor generally finds himself committed. But, ready of speech though these courteous guides prove invariably to be, the extent to which they are accustomed to the simplicities of English visitors and to reeling off well-worn clichés for their benefit makes it possible for their guests to return home with generalisations more picturesque than accurate. It is the man or woman who has had little or no direct intercourse with foreigners who, often, by some chance phrase or experience, gives an enquirer the precious view into the real state of things-precious, that is, if the foreigner has insight, perspective, and knowledge enough to appraise it. The life and soul of another country, even of a country whose talk is of bullocks,' are not laid bare to a foreigner in a week or two of easy sight-seeing, in which he puts forth little or no intellectual exertion.

It need hardly be said that the more or less pressing proposals which have been made, in not a few instances, to apply Danish methods to English conditions have been by no means according to knowledge either of Danish or of English agricultural practice. Those who have lightly proposed the Danification or Hollandising of England have certainly omitted to tell us what form the development of our country at the hands of the Danish or Dutch agricultural invaders would be likely to take when they found themselves in the possession of coal and iron. Danish agriculture and Dutch agriculture are what they are largely because Denmark is wholly without minerals and Holland is practically so.

While we are a naturally rich, primarily manufacturing country, Denmark is a naturally poor, primarily agricultural country. While our agriculture is wholly devoted to providing food for the people and the cattle of Great Britain, and succeeds in providing only a proportion of the supplies needed, Denmark is farming not only to feed herself, but with a view to sending enough produce abroad to obtain from her foreign customers the wherewithal to buy all the necessities of modern life beyond bread, meat, milk, and cheese. The English, Scots, and Irish farmer's eyes are ordinarily on the corn and hay and straw merchants and the cattle dealers in Vol. 225.-No. 446.

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the next market town. The Danish farmer's eyes are on the needs of the British breakfast table.

There are, nevertheless, several reasons why it is profitable to enquire into the causes underlying the success of agriculture just across the North Sea. One of them is that British agriculture and Danish and Dutch agriculture are at least comparable in this that they are carried on by men of the same stock, living under the same conditions of administrative and political liberty, and with all the advantages or disadvantagesaccording to the reader's view-of Free Trade. The main agricultural products except cheese are admitted to Denmark duty free.* In Holland a determined attempt to pass a Tariff Bill has lately been defeated; and since 1877 all the prime necessaries of life, including grain and flour and most raw materials for agricultural and industrial purposes, have been admitted free.† Import duties in Belgium did not average more than 1 per cent. on the value of the supplies brought from abroad.

But the chief reason why those who are attempting to promote rural progress in Great Britain may usefully look about them in Denmark and Holland particularly, and examine some ideas in the light of Danish and Dutch experience, is that the Danes and the Dutch, because of the lack of minerals in their countries, have been able to devote to the consideration of land problems an amount of attention, on the part of men of science, educationists, social reformers and business men, which in Great Britain must be shared with other questions. Possibly, when we realise what a magnificent dividend has been returned by the attention given by Denmark

*There is a duty on preserved meats and preserved foods, on fruit, hops and sugar.

The Dutch are as near a "free breakfast table" as we are. The only things to eat or drink on which duty is payable are honey, confectionery, dried fruit, nuts and spices, meats, tea and intoxicants. Jam, marmalade, syrup, treacle, sugar, dried and preserved fruit, chutney and condensed milk, tea and intoxicants, are mulcted by our Customs. With regard to the Dutch duty on fresh, dried and salted meats, seeing that mutton and pork come in free and the whole Customs income from fresh, salted and dried kinds together is only 16007.-the import is 384 tons against an export of 35,400 tons-it is no great matter. On the other hand, coffee and cocoa, on which we levy duty, are admitted free, and manufactured tobacco comes in at the nominal rate of 10s. per cwt. Our Customs receives 14,000,000l. a year from these articles.'-'A Free Farmer in a Free State' (p. 275).

and Holland to their agriculture, we may increasingly feel that in our own country, where agriculture not only employs a larger proportion of the population than any other pursuit but furnishes that reservoir of physical strength and vigour by which the physical, mental and moral stamina of the towns is so largely sustained, clear thinking about rural life and industry, and resolute and wise action in its interests, may be of immeasurable value to the nation.

There are now half-a-dozen Danish farmers working land in England. What is it that one learns from these men, from one's Danish friends, and from travelling about Denmark? Three lessons of the simplest possible kind, so simple that they can never be repeated too often. The first is the lesson of adaptability, of enterprise, of willingness to march with the times. The second is the lesson of education and character. The third is the lesson of mutual aid. These are lessons for every country, irrespective of economic and climatic conditions.

Because the creameries and wholesale cheese-making of the Danes and Dutch pay handsomely, it is not necessarily good business for our farmers to give up catering for the almost unlimited demand for household milk at a rising price. The fact that the prosperity which has come to the Danes has been aided by cooperative bacon factories, while the equally successful Dutch have left co-operative pig-killing alone, may not be a conclusive reason for pressing upon our farmers prospectuses for co-operative bacon production in every county town. That the Danes and the Dutch see their way to big crops of sugar beet is not of itself a reason for insisting on all our farmers at once giving large areas to that crop. Because a Danish or Dutch farmer is a member of half-a-dozen or a dozen co-operative societies, that is not to say that at this moment it is co-operation of which our three-hundred-acre farmers are most of all in need. Because a 'Christian GoatBreeding Society' and a 'Catholic Egg-Collecting Society'

This is not to say, however, that the case for sugar beet for certain agricultural areas in England is not made out. In the opinion of the present writer it is made out.