The connecting link between the City Colony and the Country Colony will be the Suburban Farm. Situated conveniently near to the largest cities, it will serve many important purposes.

1. It will form the channel, or outlet, by which the agricultural portion of the labor overflow in the cities will make its way back to the country. In fact, it will constitute a sort of sluice which will in time act with the same regularity and ease as those which are attached to any reservoir of water, directing to the most needy places, and distributing without waste, those very waters which if uncontrolled would sweep everything before them as a devastating flood.

2. It will at the same time find a ready market in the city, not only for its own produce, but for that of the other branches of the country colony, with which it would be in constant and close communication.

3. It will supply the city with wholesome and unadulterated dairy produce, together with the best fruits and vegetables, at the ordinary market rates. These could be disposed of either wholesale to city merchants, or by moans of stalls in the various markets, or we could undertake to retail them in connection with our Household Salvage Brigade. The Suburban Farm would consist of, say, from fifty to five hundred acres of land in the immediate neighbourhood of a city. It would combine three or more separate departments.

1. The Dairy. Buffaloes and cows would be given us by friends, besides being purchased and reared by us, in large numbers. To tend them, milk them, prepare the ghee, cream and butter, and to convey it all to town, would find employment for a large number of the Submerged Tenth.

2. The Market Garden would employ a still larger number. Bananas grow quickly in all parts of India, and with them we could make an immediate beginning, introducing from different districts the best species. Sugar-cane and other popular native products would receive special attention, and where the European population in the neighbourhood was sufficiently numerous we could include the cultivation of such fruits and vegetables as would be liked by them. In the case of seaport towns we should no doubt do a large business with the steamers in the harbour, as for instance, in Bombay, Colombo, or Calcutta.

3. We should probably at an early period transfer some of the industrial brigades enumerated in Chapter VI to our Suburban Farm. In doing this there would be several obvious advantages:

(a) We should have more elbow room for them on the Farm, than in the Labor Yards, where land would be so expensive that we should be obliged to crowd everything into the smallest possible compass, both in regard to work sheds and sleeping accommodation.

(b) In removing them from the contaminating influences of city life, we should be able to exercise a more personal and powerful influence upon these members of the Submerged Tenth and should stand a far better chance of effectively carrying out that spiritual and moral regeneration, without which we reckon that any mere temporal reformation would be ineffective and evanescent.

(c) We should prevent our labor yards from getting gorged, and would keep them within manageable dimensions. At the same time that we should cope more effectively with all existing distress.

(d) The Suburban Farm being closely connected with other portions of our Country Colony, we should be able to use the latter to relieve it in case of its becoming in turn overcrowded by the influx from the City.

(e) It would thus form a natural stepping-stone to the Industrial Village, which we have next to describe.