INTRODUCTION

FOR a long while past I have been anxious to undertake a very heavy task, that of the investigation of the conditions of the rural England of our day. Towards the end of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth centuries my great predecessor, Arthur Young, wrote many volumes on this subject which must always remain our chief source of information as to the agriculture of England during that period. William Marshall also treated of it between 1787 and 1800 in his General Survey of the rural Economy of England.' Later, in 1830, William Cobbett published his 'Rural Rides,' which are full of useful information, but, perhaps, somewhat too highly tinged with the hue of the writer's own political opinions. Lastly, fifty years ago, Sir James Caird, under the title of English Agriculture,' collected into a volume the valuable and interesting letters which he wrote upon this matter as Commissioner for The Times,' since which date, so far as I am aware, no one has attempted to carry out similar researches on any considerable scale.

During the last half-century, however, our agriculture, and indeed everything connected with the land, landowners, and husbandmen of England, have undergone great changes; it seemed to me, therefore, that there was some need for a new work treating of these questions. Such a work I purposed to write, and at length, through the enterprise of the Daily Express' newspaper, discovered an opportunity of carrying out my design. The articles that form the

foundation of these volumes, expanded now to full three or four times their original bulk by the addition of matter for which it would have been impossible for a journal to find space, appeared in the columns of that paper in 1901, and were the result of a journey of about eight months' duration through the greater part of England, accomplished by myself in that year. Since its conclusion I have continued my inquiries in Norfolk, Suffolk, and other counties, and largely supplemented the store of facts and deductions that I was able to collect during its progress. The results are now offered to the reader in these volumes.

When a man straightens his back after building the chief corner-stone into the labour of a life that has not been idle, he is apt, perhaps, as its weight leaves his hands, to congratulate himself unduly. But reflection will tell him how much more massive that stone might have been if he could have found the strength to quarry and to lift it, and of how far finer a material, and less marred with flaws, had he known where best it should be searched for, and in what way most shapely hewn. For instance, let me admit at once that my work is incomplete. I have, I think, examined into the state of twenty-seven counties, exclusive of the Channel Islands, whereof none of those who went before me seem to have treated. But other counties remain unexplored, and beyond them lie Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Whether I shall ever find time and strength to continue my investigations in these places is to be doubted, so meanwhile I must content myself with the reflection that I have perhaps covered almost as much of England as any of my predecessors—the entire task proved too vast for every one of us.

Arthur Young, I believe-although of this fact I am not certain described in all about the same number, namely, twenty-six counties; William Marshall fewer, but in great detail; Sir James Caird more, but in less detail. He says

that he traversed thirty-two of the forty counties of England.' Should, then, the finishing of this quest be left to a hand or hands unknown, perhaps unborn, I will venture to give him or them, out of the store of my own experience, a few hints as to the qualifications needful to the perfect investigator of agricultural matters and the English land, to which eminence, needless to say, I lay no claim.

Physically such a person must be very strong, since the work is the hardest that I have ever undertaken. Not only are the necessary correspondence and arrangements in themselves troublesome, but when these are completed, he must travel week after week and month after month, by rail, with horses, in motor-cars, on bicycles, and on foot, in order to fulfil his hundreds of engagements. He must never fall ill, or, if he does, must go on as I did, until he is well again, or collapses utterly, which I am thankful to say I did not. Every night he must be prepared, at the end of the toil of a long day, to plunge into unknown society, to make acquaintance with many new faces and listen to many fresh views or arguments, without showing signs of an exhaustion which his hosts or their guests might, not unnaturally, attribute to a lack of interest and proper gratitude. Never for one instant must he allow his attention to flag, his powers of observation to become dull, or his sight and hearing to miss anything that is of importance to his cause.

His mind should be that of a trained lawyer, able to weigh and sift evidence, discriminating between the true and the false, the weighty and the trivial. His intelligence must be of that patient and prosaic order that scorns no detail, however oft repeated, knowing that in each there is some difference from all that went before, if only it can be grasped. Vexations, disappointments, even occasional impertinences and rebuffs, should not disturb him; with a smile he must try again elsewhere. Also he must have money at

his command, since such long journeyings are costly. He must learn to write accurate articles and notes under any circumstances and at any time, and, what is still more important, how to read the latter afterwards. To heat, cold, and bodily weariness he must be indifferent. Lastly, not to prolong the list, he should really know something about agriculture, and must have given adequate study to those great questions of which he proposes to treat.

Of these qualifications and others left unrecorded, I can with humility lay some claim to one-an acquaintance with my subject. I was born in a farmhouse, among high-hedged pastures near to the silence of a great wood, and I suppose the first sounds that my ears heard were the lowing of kine and the bleating of sheep. Perhaps, if there be any truth in such theories, it is to this fact that I owe my rural bent.

Since then all my life has been more or less connected with the soil, at home and oversea; and before ever I thought of writing on it I was, mayhap unconsciously, engaged in observing in many lands the ways of Nature and of those who dwell in her constant fellowship. Thus, amongst other places, I have travelled in and tried to learn what I was able of the physical peculiarities, climate, and husbandry of Holland, Norway, France, and Italy in Europe, of Cyprus and Syria in the Mediterranean, of Egypt and the Southern Territories and States in Africa, of Mexico in Central America, and of Iceland in the Northern seas. I have owned and own land, have in Natal worked with my own hands on the land, have hired and hire land, and for the last thirteen years or so have been myself a practical farmer of a considerable acreage of land in England, as once I was abroad. This, then, is the main equipment which emboldened me to make the great attempt that is now at length concluded.

When I began it one of the questions that perplexed me was the exact fashion in which I ought to treat my subject.

Now of fashions, as 'of writing tribal lays,' there may be many: for instances, the somewhat violent way of Cobbett; the descriptive way illustrated with copious examples of Arthur Young, perhaps the best for a leisurely age; the compressed way of Sir James Caird, which alone is possible where much matter must be crowded into a minimum of space, and so forth.

All of these, however, appeared to me to be open to the objection that they are too liable to be coloured to the tint of the author's own mind. Every man has his predilections and opinions, and if his work is worth anything, they will reappear therein. But it seems to me desirable that these should be kept out of records of facts, whatever prominence he chooses to give, or cannot help giving to them in the deductions which he draws from those facts. It was for this reason that, notwithstanding the great extra labour involved, I determined to adopt a new system-that of the interview. By this means I am enabled to preserve, together with something of their personalities, the individual experience and opinions of many witnesses which, if I had been content to melt them down in the crucible of my own intelligence, might have acquired, perhaps, qualities derived from myself rather than from my informants.

Therefore, separating his evidence from my comments, I have recorded the substance of what each man said to me as he said or wrote it, always from notes taken in his presence, or from written documents with which he has furnished me, and, except in cases where I have been asked to omit it, under his own name.

Although here and there misinterpretation may have occurred, such testimony is in the main incontestable. It does at least furnish an actual record of what a certain number of people intimately connected with English land and agriculture, thought and said on these matters in the years 1901 and 1902. Of course the method, like every other, has its draw