We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
— 83i —
we shall be wrong in assuming that man may live and philosophise simultaneously, that is to say that the two sides of the question are equal.
However this may be, eveiy village has its leading men, whose business it is to devote their energies to the improvement of rural life under the aspects to which we allude.
I. — The " raison d'dtre " of the movement in favour of the Improvement of Rural Life is beyond question.
The development of the human factor in agriculture, the improvement of environment and social and family ties, are the points at issue here. The labourer should be taught how to make better use of his resources, in order to have a happier environment, and, with his wife, to take more interest in the formation of the character of his children and increase the happiness of family life.
It is indeed a repetition of the social problem, with special application to the welfare of the peasant and his family.
Statesmen such as the unforgettable M. Melin, have pointed out the way. Mr. James, Minister of Agriculture for Canada, told me many years ago that after having improved flower growing, animal raising, machines, it was suddenly recollected that there was a farmer on the farm that this farmer had a wife and children, that the centre of exploitation was not in the fields, stables or machine sheds, but within the four walls of the house, and that in future if more interest were taken in the farmer and his family all the rest would be added.
In America a " Commission for Country Life " has been created by President Roosevelt, at the initiative of Sir Horace Plunkett.
President Roosevelt has said: The big interests of Agriculture are the human interests. Good harvests, good cattle are of small value to the farmer. They open no doors to good living conditions on the farm.
President Hoover recently declared at St. Louis that the agricultural problem was not only an economic, but a social problem, that the farm is not only a place for business, but also a place where the farmer should live comfortably with his family.
Signor Mussolini has rightly put the ruralisation of Italy at the head of his program, and the improvement of rural life is an important chapter of it (i).
In Belgium this movement began on the occasion of the exhibits of the " Ferme demonstrative " at Liege in 1905; The Pavillion of the Farmer's Wife at Bruxelles in 1910, and the Exhibit of the Modern Village at Ghent,
(1) See my lecture of the Dec. 19 1928 at the meeting of the Agricultural Society of Bologna the present President of which is M. Laur junior, at Brugge (Argoire, Switzerland).
ingl. 3