backs. Thus it may seem to involve a certain amount of repetition. This, however, as any careful student will note, is more apparent than actual. Each county, and all its districts, have peculiarities of their own. Also the husbandman always wears his rue with a difference. Even as no two leaves are alike, although to the casual eye they appear so similar, so there exist variations between every one of a thousand tales of agricultural woe.

These variations, however, can in the end be classified, therefore it is useless to pursue them beyond a certain point. Thus I am persuaded that if the views of each landowner, tenant farmer, agent, clergyman, doctor, small-holder, labourer, optimist, pessimist and moderate man, which I have recorded, were multiplied by a hundred of those of the same class in the same districts, the results would be in fact identical. Such as I have set down are a fair sample from bulk' taken very much at hazard, as the merchant takes corn which he wishes to buy. The evidence that I have collected, therefore, may be accepted, I believe, without doubt or cavil as typical of the state and opinions of the counties and classes of which it treats.

I may add that it was not always quite easy to collect, especially, though not exclusively, in the case of farmers of the less educated sort, some of whom are by nature very suspicious. Such men often find it difficult to understand that a person could undertake a wearisome mission of the kind without an ulterior object tending to his own advantage or to their disadvantage. One gentleman of this stamp, who chanced to be in a very large way of business, was, I remember, quite unable to explain my real aims to his private satisfaction. At last his curiosity led him to consult me on the point, when I discovered he had evolved the theory that the true end for which I was engaged in travelling the length and breadth of England was a thirst, not for

rural information, but for-free drinks! The instance, in its utter absurdity, is illustrative of the mental calibre which finds it impossible to conceive that a man will devote himself to anything, solely to forward the accomplishment of a large and public object.

Indeed such an idea, I am sorry to say, is often foreign to farmers as a whole; whence perhaps their rooted dislike and mistrust of co-operation. They look too much to their intimate and private interests, and allow their views to be hedged in too closely by the conditions of their immediate neighbourhood. Therefore they will not combine for the good of their class, though combination is to their own good also, or be convinced even that circumstances vary in different parts of this great land and that they have anything to learn from them.

As I write, two examples occur to me. One man, after reading certain of my articles, sent me a letter to the effect that he had observed I described agriculture in England as depressed. Now, he said in substance, if you will come to see my farm I will show you that you are quite mistaken. To that man the affairs of his little farm were the husbandry of England. The second example comes from nearer home. In the midst of my journeyings I returned here for a night and sent for my own worthy steward to ask how things were progressing on the farms. When our business conversation was finished I inquired of him if he had read the articles I was writing. He replied he had seen 'some of them.' I suggested that he might do well to continue his studies and so improve his mind by finding out what farmers were doing in other places. He answered with decision: 'I don't want to know what folk are doing in other places; I want to know what they are doing here.'

After this I did not feel equal to pursuing the argument, but I reflected that the spirit shown by the remark was far

too common among British husbandmen, and is indeed one of the causes of their failure to cope with these difficult times. They will not learn and they will not combine, and until they do so they must be content to bear the sorrows and scorns that are heaped upon them.

Personally, although it is hard to know in what direction to look for light, even in face of so much that is discouraging, I do not take a hopeless view of the future of British agriculture, at any rate in so far as the cultivator as distinct from the owner of land is concerned. The wheel of fortune may go round with some quick and unexpected turn, as in this world it is always going round. Also our land is as good as ever it was, and has the advantage of all the enormous improvements made upon it at great cost in the prosperous past. But we must change our methods and above all we must co-operate, for the case of the agricultural interests is an instance of the old story of the single stick that can, and of the faggot that cannot be broken.

I

As I have pointed out, this work does not deal with every district in England, or indeed with every division in those districts whereof it treats. That circumstance seems sometimes to have given great offence to gentlemen resident in the omitted places, who have expressed themselves strongly upon the subject in their local newspapers. appeal to such critics to remember that it is not possible for a busy man to give up more than a certain proportion of his life to the execution of a task which, for obvious reasons, is one that in the main must be its own reward. Further, the whole of Mudie's would not contain the works that might be written about English agriculture, were it to be treated with the detail that some correspondents appear to desire. As it is, these volumes are long enough; a fact which has prevented me from dealing with certain subjects whereof I wished to speak, such as the history

of English land tenure and the gradual extinction of the peasant proprietor.

Whilst alluding to this subject of criticism, I venture to express the hope also that I may be judged by what I have actually said or written, and not, as too often has been my lot, by what I am supposed to have said or written. To take a single example. It is nothing short of alarming to a man who holds such quack and predatory remedies in strong dislike, to read in journals which circulate throughout the world, that Mr. Rider Haggard by his advocacy of the enforced cultivation of derelict land. . . has given the Radicals a new electoral programme.' Or again, that the taxation of waste land derives fresh strength from the advocacy of Mr. Rider Haggard, who seems to have imbibed certain advanced ideas from long residence in Radical Norfolk.' Strange as it may seem, these exceedingly erroneous interpretations of my views were evidently founded upon the following passage taken from a speech which I made before the Central Chamber of Agriculture in November 1901 :

'Within forty miles of where he was now standing he had seen some thousands of acres of land absolutely derelict, and he had seen many more thousands of acres practically derelict. It was a sad thing to look at this land and to know that if it were furnished with suitable communications and put beneath the spade, it could be made to produce a great amount of food, though it might not pay under corn nowa-days. Surely it would be desirable to adopt some method to bring together the men who wanted to till those acres and the acres that wanted to be tilled.'

My reason for mentioning this matter here, since contradictions rarely overtake such statements, is that for aught I know these somewhat serious allegations against my agricultural character may still be repeated and believed by news

VOL. I.

a

papers and their readers. Therefore I wish to deny them once and for all. Indeed, had I been capable of advocating the monstrous injustice of penalising men because they could find nobody to cultivate their land, and were unable to afford to do so themselves, I should be quite unfit to pose as an impartial investigator of the grave problems connected with the present state of agriculture in England.

The illustrations in these volumes are from photographs taken, nearly all of them, upon my travels. They are inserted, not to add to the attractiveness of the book, for which purpose hand-camera pictures are scarcely suited, but to its value, by the representation of certain things, such as cattle, small-holders' or other typical houses, specimen landscapes, remarkable trees, &c. as I saw them.

The maps, for which I am so largely indebted to the labours of my friend Mr. Cochrane, and to the care of Messrs. G. Philip & Son in reproducing them, have been compiled upon a new principle from information which we collected during and since our journeyings. The idea occurred to me that it would be most useful, and furnish an easy mode of reference, if a certain amount of local agricultural lore could be conveyed to the inquirer upon the face of each map; a method that, so far as I am aware, has as yet scarcely been attempted. It must be remembered, however, that the sum of facts which can be included is necessarily limited by the small surface area of the maps themselves. Doubtless also, although every care has been taken to ensure accuracy, some errors may be found by persons intimately acquainted with particular districts. For these I apologise beforehand.

Indeed the same remark applies to all this book. Here or there a name may have been misspelt, a place or a field misdescribed, or even, when several gentlemen were talking together-though I think that this has happened very