As to the present, there has been lately, within my knowledge, a great building of village institutes.  There has been a tremendous development of football.  Village industries, under the wise encouragement of the Development Commission, are reviving.  Motor buses make access to town amusements much easier, and cinemas come out into the village.  There is revived interest and very keen competition in the allotment and cottage garden shows.  Thus it is, at any rate, down our way—­but no one can know more than his own bit of country.  On these and similar matters we ought to think and watch and meet together to report and discuss.  We need more Maurice Hewletts and Mrs. Sturge Grettons to tell us how things really are, for nothing is so difficult to visualise as what is going on slowly in one’s own parish.

CO-OPERATION

I come lastly to co-operation.  You will think me biased when I speak of its possibilities.  I am.  I have been for eighteen years on the governing body of the Agricultural Organisation Society, and happen now to be its chairman, and am therefore closely in touch with the work of organising co-operative effort.  One sees fairly clearly how difficult it is to make any class of English agriculturists combine for any mutual purpose, how worth while it is, and what almost unexpected opportunities of useful work still exist.  Thanks largely to untiring work by Sir Leslie Scott—­who gave up the chairmanship of the society on his recent appointment as Solicitor-General—­the country is now fairly covered by societies for purchasing requirements co-operatively—­principally fertilisers, feeding-stuffs, and seeds.  There are also affiliated to the movement I have mentioned, many useful co-operative auction marts, slaughter-house societies, bacon factories, wool societies, egg and poultry societies, and fruit and garden produce societies (but not nearly enough), besides a thousand or so societies of allotment holders which, thanks largely to our friend, George Nicholls, set all the others an example in keenness and loyalty to their parent body.

The ideal is that where a society exists the main raw materials of the industry shall be bought wholesale instead of retail, and the main products of the industry sold retail instead of wholesale; that thereby middlemen’s and other profits shall be reduced to a reasonable figure, and that the consumer shall get the most efficient possible service with regard to his supplies.  It is also the ideal that farmers and others shall learn more comradeship and brotherhood; that the big and small men alike shall become one community bound together for many common purposes, and that thus the cultivators of the soil shall lose that isolation and selfishness which is a reproach against them.  The ideal is, however, not always realised.  The farmer likes to have a co-operative society to keep down other people’s prices, but, having helped to form a society, he does