they should as far as possible take their place among the ordinary population of the country, instead of being treated 'as a class apart.' The Committee have no doubt that the openings for disabled men in agriculture are considerable. Such men can act as shepherds or cattlemen, and can do many forms of farm work, i.e. hoe turnips, work in the hay and harvest field, help in threshing, repair fences, scour ditches, etc. They can also do much of the work on a fruit or marketgarden holding, and can attend to pigs and poultry. Men with a mechanical turn might be employed in connexion with the use and repair of agricultural machinery.

The return to the land is a familiar phrase— it has been an aspiration for long. Yet few things are so beset with difficulties. Agriculture is something more than art-like poetry, it is a state of mind. If it be true that you cannot make a poet, it is very nearly true that you cannot make an agriculturist. Mr. Maurice Hewlett has recently been writing about the peasant volunteer. He would have the labourers from the land who have served in the army returned to the land and enabled to farm for themselves. They must return, he points out, to the land they know. It would be useless to expect a Sussex man to take up farming in the Shires with either heart or hope. Mr. Hewlett understands the psychology of the peasant, and the illustration he gives indicates some of the difficulty. But if a Sussex peasant cannot be turned into a Buckinghamshire small holder, is it likely that a Cockney car conductor can be trained into a successful farmer? The fact is that modern city life has created a type of mind that can no more live in the country than a fish can live out of the water. There are exceptional minds which have resisted the city influence, and where you find in man and wife two such minds, there you have a potentially successful small holder-but not otherwhere. The cities have taken and subdued to their will captives from the land—they will never give them up. Against this it is said that the tremendous experience of service in this greatest of wars will result in a sort of re-birth -a profound unsettlement and temperamental change which will lead men to desire a complete change of occupationwhich will break the shackles of habit. It may be. At present there is little evidence to support such a view. To me it seems false psychology. Habit is not broken-even thus.

IV

The French system of re-education of the disabled by means of mechano-therapy' and other treatments has been carefully examined by medical and other commissions from this country, and the announcement has recently been made that the system is likely to be widely adopted in connexion with our military hospitals. The Zander method of treatment of stiff limbs and deformities, and the substitution of machines for hand manipulation, are not unfamiliar. Zander institutes have been in existence here for some years. The idea has, however, been developed with admirable ingenuity in France, and the exercises have been made to serve a double purpose in at once treating the disability and educating the patient. Professor Guermonprey, of Lille, has been a pioneer in the scientific re-education of the disabled, and he was among the first to perceive the intimate connexion that might exist between curative treatment and industrial training. He introduced various apparatus at his hospital at Calais soon after the war began. By means of these, stiff limbs are exercised, malformations corrected, the degree of disability scientifically ascertained, and the soldier's treatment continued with a definite relation to the physical effort required in the occupation the man hopes to resume.

There are now more than 50 re-educational establishments in France, most of which receive some form of Government subsidy as well as support from municipal authorities and private subscriptions.

The Grand Palais, Paris, was taken over and converted into a military hospital in January 1915. It now has about 2500 beds and is the central 'Dépôt de Physiothérapie' to which soldiers are sent from the other military hospitals for the various forms of treatment which are being carried out under the direction of Professor Jean Camus. These include electrical treatment, eau courante or whirlpool baths, massage, mechanical exercises, etc. The results obtained have been remarkable. In one month (October 1915) 420 men were returned to active service in the army who otherwise would have been pensioned as permanently disabled. This obviously represents a very considerable saving to the State in pensions alone. There is an out-patients' department for officers.

The hospital at St. Maurice has accommodation for 700 patients, and in connexion with it is the Vacassy Institute, which provides industrial training. A large number of trades are taught, including boot-making, tailoring, basket-making, printing, bookbinding, tinsmithing, harness-making, etc. Voluntary instructors are sent to the Institute by the different Guilds of the city of Paris. The Fédération Nationale des Mutilés de la Guerre, Paris, has established both residential and non-residential workshops for the disabled. Men who live at home receive a wage of 4 francs a day and their dinner. Men 'living in' are all found in every way, and receive a proportion of the earnings of the whole establishment.

The Anglo-Belgian Hospital at Rouen receives Belgian soldiers requiring special treatment by the new methods of physiothérapie. The hospital was established on the site of a vocational school and the fact that the mechano-therapeutic apparatus required for the extensive installation which it now possesses was for the most part manufactured in the workshops by the disabled themselves is an admirable instance of ingenuity and resourcefulness. At this hospital the men receive the beginnings of re-education entirely under medical direction; they are then passed on to the complementary establishment, which is mainly industrial. This is the Institut Militaire Belge at Vernon (Eure), and is described by Mr. W. M. Dobell, of the Canadian Military Hospitals Commission, as the most interesting establishment of the kind which he had seen. There is accommodation for about 1200 men, and the Institute is not only self-supporting, but it has paid back to the Belgian Government the entire capital cost of installation. The cost per man per day is only 2.05 francs, and this includes the usual pay of the Belgian soldier of 43 centimes per day. Forty-three different trades trades are taught, covering every imaginable occupation. There is a large farm in connexion with the establishment on which wounded horses are cared for and made useful. The workshops provide for instruction in book-keeping, shorthand, typewriting, telegraphy, moulding in clay, wood-carving, drawing and designing of all descriptions, wall-paper designing and painting, the manufacture of motor vehicles and all kinds of electrical machinery, tinsmithing, plumbing, tailoring. Poultry and rabbit farming are taught, and also fur curing, dyeing, and trimming.

The land on which the establishment is built was originally forest. A saw mill was erected, and the forest thinned out on scientific principles, the timber being converted either into lumber required for the buildings or such as would be saleable in the open market. Large quantities of pickets and stakes. of all descriptions required by the Belgian Army were manufactured, and also large wickerwork shields, which were used for laying on swampy ground under gun-carriages, so as to prevent them from sinking.

The buildings cost 450,000 francs, and the equipment and plant for the workshops 300,000 francs. All of this has been repaid to the Belgian Government out of profits on lumber and the produce of the workshops. Most of the work has been done for the Belgian War Office, and this has enabled the Government to get their supplies very much more cheaply than they were doing from other sources. Thus fuse-boxes which were being made in the United States at a cost of 30 francs apiece were subsequently made and delivered by the Vernon workshops at 10 francs apiece, which still left a profit of 2 francs to the establishment. The workshops make all their own tools, as well as a large number for the Belgian army. A great deal of Government printing work is also done. The men are paid, in addition to their army pay, from 5 to 20 centimes per hour, according to the work they do, and the surplus profits are now being funded for the benefit of the men.

While in the workshops the men are still mobilised and under military discipline. When a man is considered efficient in his trade and able to earn his own living, he is allowed to take his discharge on condition that he first takes three months' furlough and that he then has suitable employment to go to, or that he is going to start business on his own account with a reasonable prospect of success. In this case he is given a complete outfit for his trade, together with a sufficient stock of raw material to make a start. The Vernon establishment is' fed' from the Anglo-Belgian Hospital at Rouen, so that men are only admitted after they have completed actual hospital treatment.

Mr. Dobell points out that among the causes which have contributed to the remarkable success of the Vernon scheme are the facts that the men are still soldiers under military control, and that the population of Belgium was the most highly

trained industrial community in Europe, the great majority of the men having a thorough knowledge of some trade, and very few being illiterate.

To illustrate the scientific spirit in which this problem is being approached in France, it is worth while to quote from a paper written by Professor Jules Amar, Directeur, Laboratoire des Recherches sur le Travail Professionnel, Paris, and published in the Special Bulletin of the Canadian Military Hospitals Commission :

'At the outset one notices that the future of the wounded man depends upon the directing of his activities to some particular trade. The greatest care must therefore be taken in determining the best occupation for each individual, the director being guided not only by the man's previous experience, but by his tastes and by his physical and psychological capacities. . . . Let us imagine a wounded man who, previous to the war, exercised the trade of machine erector. A third of his right arm is now amputated. The physical and psychic examinations show us that he is in good health, gifted with average intelligence, and fairly well educated. An experimental analysis conducted according to the technics of the physical laboratory reveals a perfect state of mobility of the stump and the possibility of fitting to him that artificial limb which will best suit his vocational requirements. Under these conditions the man might and should be directed towards the trade of a machinist. Re-education will develop motive powers in the left arm, and the artificial right limb will more often fulfil the rôle of supporter: that is, will prove a static force rather than a directory power; and if it be properly fitted one has the right to expect from the individual a rapidity and precision of movement which will be sufficient for all practical purposes.

'Let us imagine, on the other hand, an individual possessed only of moderate intelligence and clumsy in other respects. We should direct him towards the trade, for example, of basket-making. . . .

'Also one must endeavour to overcome tendencies towards indolence. The disabled man must be made to understand, and he will easily grasp the fact, that work alone is the regenerator and sole fortifier of his body and his mind; it alone furnishes material sources for a livelihood, and those moral resources which, in him especially, excite our admiration. A too prolonged stay in hospitals and convalescent homes is the true cause of idleness, which is moreover accentuated by the atrophied condition of the stumps there condemned to inaction. The re-education of the joints and the muscles, followed by exercise in his trade, so harmonised as to assure for the individual the maximum of his output, must begin in the convalescent home before medical treatment is finished. . .

'But it is asked what is the proportion of the mutilated who are capable of recovering their working and social value by a re-educa