n officials who would exploit the
country in the interest of the town.

The tenants whom the Socialists would like to create would, rightly
considered, be merely wage-earners in the pay of the Socialistic
administration, who, living from hand to mouth, would not be able to
put anything by. With that object in view, rents would apparently be
adjusted by Socialist administrations. "Tenancies would be granted for
seven years or for twenty-one years revisable at periods of seven
years, so that the tenant might not be able to appropriate the
unearned increment of the land; but it should also be clearly
understood that a satisfactory tenant would not be arbitrarily
disturbed in his holding. At the same time no mercy would be extended
to a bad cultivator; and when a tenant left his holding, either by the
efflux of time or for any other reason, he would have no tenant-right
to dispose of, but would only be entitled to compensation for
unexhausted improvements and to a fair settlement of accounts as
between himself and the committee. Rents would be fixed and disputes
settled by the independent agricultural court, which would also
continue the regulation of agricultural wages. Exploitation of the
economically weak must not be permitted, even to a communal authority.
It would be within the power of the committee to rent farms to
co-operative associations of labourers if satisfied as to their
industrial and financial capacity. Arrangements might also be made
whereby a town could run its own dairy-farm or farms, since this is
probably the only way in which a municipality can be sure of an
uncontaminated supply of milk."[724]

Many Socialists would like to resettle the country with colonies of town
unemployed, but these proposals are opposed by some as impractical. "To
imagine that any such colony could be self-supporting, that the land
which no capitalist will now till with expert farm labourers at ten
shillings a week would yield trade-union rates of wages to a mixed crowd
of unemployed townsmen, that such a heterogeneous collection of waifs
and strays, without a common acquaintanceship, a common faith, or a
common tradition, could be safely trusted for a single day to manage the
nation's land and capital; finally, to suppose that such a fortuitous
agglomeration of undisciplined human atoms offers 'the most suitable and
hopeful way of ushering in a Socialist State'--all this argues such a
complete misconception of the actual fact