CHAPTER II. "Our appeal Is unto Him, who counts a nation's tears, And vengeance, and the recompensing years." ENGLISH agriculture can scarcely be said to have had a story until about the accession of George III., and it had no literature, properly speaking, till much later than that date. Its history may be divided into four periods :— Ist. From the accession of George III. to the end of the last century. 2nd. From the beginning of this century to the Peace of 1815. This was a period of some progress, and of much outward prosperity to agriculturists. This prosperity, however, was less real than apparent, for it was based on an insecure foundation. This was the time of the European war, when the prices of agricultural produce rose very high. 3rd. From the Peace of 1815 to the repeal of the Corn Laws, 1846. This was a time of perpetually recurring and great distress among agriculturists, during which the Legislature persevered in the vain attempt to protect the agricultural interests by restrictions on foreign produce. At the latter part of this period, however, an impulse was given, more full of promise than any which had gone before. Adversity taught what prosperity could not. The Royal Agricultural Society came into being at this time (1838), of which more hereafter. 4th. From the repeal of the Corn Laws until now—a time of unrestricted competition with the whole world, and of sound progress. During this period thousands of tons of foreign manure have been imported, incalculably increasing the producing powers of the soil, and many of the physical sciences have been studied in relation to agriculture, and practically brought to bear upon it, especially chemistry, meteorology, geology, and mechanics. The patriarch of English agriculture, good old Arthur Young, died in 1820, at eighty years of age. He had been totally blind for ten years; but so clear-sighted was he in another sense, that he prophesied much which has since come to pass in the history of agriculture. So far back as 1769 he wrote an essay urging the expediency of freetrade in corn, for which monstrous and unpatriotic proposition he was burned in effigy. He was a man of a very pure and innocent nature. His enthusiasm about agriculture caused many people to wonder. But there were other men of pure and manly nature, who were, the very year of his death, studying his subject with a like enthusiasm, and in no unphilosophic spirit. Our leading agriculturists do not seem to have inclined to metaphysics. They have been brought much in contact with the beautiful ́works of God under the open sky; and it has been foolishly supposed that the simple, primitive occupation of husbandry needs only to claim for its service the most ordinary kind of men, with more sinew than brain. Shallow politicians have been too much in the habit of making invidious comparisons between the cultivators of the soil and people who are employed in other kinds of industry, and to assume that the former class presents a solitary exception to the law of energetic progress which prevails in our manufactures and arts. The spirit of our feudal institutions continues to influence our laws and ideas about landed property; our large landowners are too seldom men of business; territorial acquisitions give a factitious importance without the exercise of business talent or judgment; and the condition of some of our rural populations, in regard to education, material prosperity, and moral character, is a disgrace to our boasted civilization. We are not yet emancipated from the traditions of the old régime which supposed only one noble class, and required the enslavement and degradation of all other classes in order to support it. It is the tail of the snake, which lives and is dangerous after the head is destroyed. But agriculture, like every other noble cause, has had its apostles and its prophets; and the work of these men has been, with strong brains and unprejudiced minds, to grapple with questions which demand the clear understanding of the laws that regulate society, and upon the right understanding of which the well-being of the community depends, added to an acquaintance with the physical laws of the universe, and experience of their subtle workings brought to light by science, together with a sound knowledge of rural, political, and international economy. My father was accustomed to say that if agriculture was ever to rank with other great sciences, "the culture of the mind must precede that of the land;" and in this rule he wished to see every class included, down to the humblest field-labourer. Of all the branches of enterprise in which our great commercial England is embarked, there is none in which the capital invested, the industry employed, or the result produced is so large in amount, or so important in kind, as in agriculture. It is one which embraces vast and varied interests, and which requires the service of brains not less calm and clear than those of Arthur Young, and the men who followed him. Agriculturists, as a class, have been accused, and not unjustly, of narrowness and selfishness in urging the consideration of their own interests on the Government, when those interests, as has often been the case, seemed to be in opposition to those of all other classes; but nowhere can we find lives more unselfish or more devoted to the public good than those of our great scientific agriculturists. Hearts as well as brains worked in the great cause; and I think that the spirit of the man who labours with a constant concern for the cheapening of the people's bread, is very closely akin to the compassionate spirit which prompted the question, “Children, have ye any meat?" which could not endure to send the multitudes away fasting, and multiplied the loaves for their use. My father expressed his hopes for the future of agriculture in his spirited sketch of its rapid and vigorous development in his own county. "This part of the country," he says, "continued in a great measure wild and uncultivated so late as the beginning of the last century, when peace and industry had produced their happy effects in the improved appearance and increased productiveness of the more southern provinces of the kingdom. And if it should excite surprise that large districts, which even within the last eighty years were in a state of nature, covered with broom, furze, or rushes, the indigenous productions of the soil-which were the latest in attracting the attention of the husbandman, and experiencing the benefit of his skill and industryshould in the interval have outstripped those in the march of agricultural improvement, which had been for centuries. in a course of cultivation, the fact may, perhaps, be in some measure accounted for by the existence of the very circumstances which at first sight seem unfavourable to such a result. Agriculture had begun to experience considerable encouragement, and to make considerable progress in different parts of England, while the country on both sides of the Scottish border continued to be the scene of rapine and violence, of hostile incursions and of predatory warfare. Such a state of society afforded no security for life, and no protection for property; the fruits of industry were too uncertain and precarious to induce to its exercise in the cultivation of the soil, and the habits and disposition of the people were little fitted for the task. Nor did they for a long time after that blessed union had been affected, which put an end to the state of hatred and hostility which existed between the two countries, and which has contributed so essentially to the happiness and prosperity of both, betake themselves to settled and industrious habits. They lived in houses of the meanest description, and the accommodation supplied to their cattle was scanty and inconvenient. The country remained generally unenclosed; and the part on which they bestowed cultivation, such as it was, consisted of small crofts adjoining their dwellings. The plough then in use is described as a clumsy and inefficient instrument, and the harrow was constructed without joints and without iron, of branches of the mountain-birch fixed together with wooden pegs, with tines of the tough broom, which it was the business of the husbandman to sharpen or renew by help of his clasp-knife, while his unshod cattle, yoked by hempen traces, were turned off to regale themselves upon the neighbouring waste. The rent then paid 1 |