It developed a scheme for the progressive establishment
throughout the world of the 'modern system' in agriculture, a system
that should give the full advantages of a civilised life to every
agricultural worker, and this replacement has been going on right up
to the present day. The central idea of the modern system is the
substitution of cultivating guilds for the individual cultivator, and
for cottage and village life altogether. These guilds are associations
of men and women who take over areas of arable or pasture land, and make
themselves responsible for a certain average produce. They are bodies
small enough as a rule to be run on a strictly democratic basis, and
large enough to supply all the labour, except for a certain assistance
from townspeople during the harvest, needed upon the land farmed. They
have watchers' bungalows or chalets on the ground cultivated, but the
ease and the costlessness of modern locomotion enables them to maintain
a group of residences in the nearest town with a common dining-room and
club house, and usually also a guild house in the national or provincial
capital. Already this system has abolished a distinctively 'rustic'
population throughout vast areas of the old world, where it has
prevailed immemorially.
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