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The Evangelist, when he said that the field was white already to harvest, was thinking of some grain which we know not in Wilts. Our broad acres are deep orange, some of them near the colour of rust. He might have had oats in his mind’s eye, not a staple of ours. Here and there they show up patches of silver-grey; but most of our corn is red wheat, a noble increase. In a burning summer such as this the familiar scene takes on the bleached glare and fierce hue of Spain or Provence. I had a train journey yesterday across West Wilts through hills all drab and tawny. The corn is shoulder-high, heavy in ear, bolt upright; a sight, you would say, as I do, to thank God for. From all sides comes the sound of the reaper, a rattle when horse-drawn, but a scream when petrol drives it, a restless disagreeable noise, not only anti-social, but unsociable. I regret the happy accidents of the vanished harvests: the reapers with their attendant girls binding after them, the busy, thirsty, brawling Irishmen; the sharp swish of the scythe which succeeded the hook and was always a pleasant sound, whether as it slashed down the straw, or when the stone tinkled rhythmically against the blade; the work in file, the noonday rest in companies—all gone now. I passed a hundred-acre field yesterday where cutting had just begun. One man was reaping it.

Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

And sings a melancholy strain:

O listen! for the vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.

It was indeed! For “she” was a machine.

“It may be wholesome but it is not good,” as Nebuchadnezzar said, munching the “unfamiliar food.” One misses the human note in agriculture, always its most pronounced and amiable feature, the thing in particular which gave poignancy to the festival which we shall celebrate this year earlier than any man here can mind our doing. The children’s holidays begin, too, this week, in obedience to what is now a forlorn convention—a mere vestige like the human appendix. For the children now have no part in harvesting. They used to twist the bonds for their mothers and sisters; but the machine does all that now, the exorbitant monster, with twine. I suppose that the hiles, as we call them, are still set up by men’s hands—that is all there is left of what used to be our high season of the mingling of both sexes, all classes, and all ages. I regret, and I fear too. If the “solitary reaper” is but the prelude to the golden age of Mr. Sidney Webb’s dream, when farms are to be measured by their square-mileage, and farming conducted in a box by a man with a switch-board in front of him, a man who might be in Whitehall for anything that appears—why, then the country will become as the town; life will be a game of automaton chess-players; and I shall go and grow vanilla in a Pacific island. Of all Utopias yet devised by the academic, Mr. Webb’s appears to me the most ghastly, and luckily also the least likely to be realised. There are “little men” here still growing corn, reaping it still with sickle and hook; and perhaps some of them are threshing it with flails, and winnowing it in the wind on floors like that of Ornan the Jebuzite. They do that still in Greece, for I have seen the floors. I don’t despair of seeing some here, where Mr. Webb’s automata are not visible. We are most of us “little men” at heart.