is happening
can be measured in terms of food. That is important, no doubt, but
it is not the most important thing. I am confident that it will add
more than anything else to the spiritual resources of the nation. It
is the beginning of a war on the disease that is blighting our
people. What is wrong with us? What is the root of our social and
spiritual ailment? Is it not the divorce of the people from the
soil? For generations the wholesome red blood of the country has
been sucked into the great towns, and we have built up a vast
machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light
of the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds
in the slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts
of nature implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths
of the streets. Can you walk through a working-class district or a
Lancashire cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets,
without a feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this
enormous perversion of life into the arid channels of death? Can you
take pride in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think
of the courts in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never rises?

"And now the sun is going to rise. We have started a revolution that
will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul
of the people. The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken. The
tyranny of the land monopoly is going to be lifted. Yes, you say,
but these people that I see working on the allotments are not the
people from the courts and the slums; but professional men, the
superior artisan, and so on. That is true. But the movement must get
hold of the _intelligenzia_ first. The important thing is that the
breach in the prison is made; the fresh air is filtering in; the
idea is born--not still-born, mind you, but born a living thing. It
is a way of salvation that will not be lost, and that all will
travel.

"We have found the land, and we are going back to possess it. Take a
man out of the street and put him in a garden, and you have made a
new creature of him. I have seen the miracle again and again. I know
a bus conductor, for example, outwardly the most ordinary of his
kind. But one night I mentioned allotments, touched the key of his
soul, and discovered that this man was going about his daily work
irradiated by the thought of his garden triumphs. He had got a new
purpose in life. He had got the spirit of