Father Conrad Pepler has done well to emphasize the sacrifice involved in a return to the land upon which more than one of the older hands at Catholic land propaganda has found it necessary to insist, as against the ‘Arcadian Shepherd’ school on the one hand and the ‘Sound Economic Proposition’ enthusiasts on the other.

In the Catholic Truth Society pamphlet on The Catholic Land Movement, the first attempt at systematic public exposition of our aims and motives, the present writer expressed a point of view which he ventures to quote:

‘Now while we believe that, whether in the meanwhile we work for or against it, this [the basing of our social system “on the land whence all our subsistence comes and on the labour of our hands which God has ordained as the means thereto”] is the only possible ultimate development, the continued existence of the vast commercio-industrial organization, with its specious offers of wealth, luxury and “convenience,” its false philosophy of ease, “leisure” and mechanical distractions as the ends of human life, and of work as mere irksome toil to be curtailed as much as possible, must remain as a stumbling block and an irresistible temptation to those not supported by true principles in facing the undoubted physical hardships and inconveniences involved in the return to a peasant life. It has been said that no people has ever voluntarily gone out from the city into the wilderness, save under the influence of a religious ideal. Mere economic considerations are not enough.