I have just finished reading Father Vincent McNabb’s inspiring book The Church and the Land, aptly described by the author as a ‘bugle-call,’ and in die May number of BLACKFRIARS the Editor asks the question, ‘Wherefore sound the bugle if there be none to answer the call?’

I believe that there are many only too anxious to answer, not only amongst the unemployed, but amongst those also who are ill-employed, working at any sort of a job in the cities because a living must be made somehow for men and wives and children. Since the war, how many men have been forced by sheer want into taking on work of this sort, quite apart from the fact that they, no more than the ‘practical objector’s’ unemployed, are fitted for it neither by temperament, training nor inclination?

Amongst these city workers in uncongenial jobs in factories and offices, there are many who suffer acutely from the pangs of land-hunger, men and women who have the love of the earth in their very blood, whose ancestors—in many cases not more than two or three generations back—were farmers, and whose keenest desire is to get back to the soil and toil to which they feel themselves called almost as powerfully as a priest to his vocation—for surely, save that of the priest, there can be no labour nearer to God than that of the land worker.

By reason of these, then, the bugle does not sound to deaf ears, but to hearts to whom it comes as the call of hope and life itself.