Urban and industrial theories and values have supplanted the truer ones of the countryside. These true ones survive mainly as a sentimental attachment to country life and gardening. Is the romance of country life really only a poetic survival of a bygone age, not very practical because there is no money in it, or is that romance something to which we must cling and on which we must build? Is farming merely a necessary drudgery, to be mechanized so as to employ a minimum of people, to be standardized and run in ever bigger units, to be judged by cost accounting only? Or is the only alternative to national decay to make farming something real for every man and near to him in his life, and something in which personal care, and possibly even poetic fancy, counts for more than mechanical efficiency?
Lord Northbourne
Look to the Land
