ABSTRACT
Leonard Elmhirst was made into a country boy by watching his father mount his horse at Laxton to visit his parishioners, by being trained to observe the good crops raised by some farmers and the poor by others, by the practice he was given on the cricket field. Leonard combined love for the country with respect for the city and hankered after the advantages of both: the good life of a kind which only the countryside can sustain and the material assets which the city enjoyed. F. C. Bartlett put a new slant on the town— country debate. What appealed to him about Dartington was that it was a community differentiated into several distinct functional groups. Leonard took up Bartlett’s argument in a speech he delivered a few months later to the Agricultural Economics Society at Oxford.
