Excerpt from The Land and the Commonwealth

It is with much pleasure that I accede to the author's request that I should pen an introduction to this work. On the principle that "a good thing needs no praise" it will suffice to say that such a volume as this, so comprehensive in its scope and so seminal in its suggestiveness, really calls for no word of commendation. The book speaks for itself. Every page provides evidence of ripe experience and notable industry. One may however, be permitted to emphasise the opportuneness of its appearance. Directly as the result of Mr. Lloyd George's recent speeches, which may fittingly be described as "half-battles" - the reverberations of which are now being re-echoed on every hill-side throughout the land - the agrarian question has at last been brought into the inner realm of practical politics. The problem has alternatively scared and baffled successive generations of British statesmen. An occasional poet, with the unchartered freedom of his order, has ventured to stray where our statesmen have feared to tread, and with sympathetic touch has limned the hard, harsh lot of the agricultural labourer:

Bowed by the weight of the centaries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his bade the burden of the world.

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