Store cattle for some reason which I cannot explain in view of the great scarcity of loots, caused by the drought of last season, are dearer than ever, instead of being cheap, as they always have been when I have, owing to similar droughts in 1887, 1893 and 1895, had to sell because I could not winter my usual stock. Now that, warned by experience, I have got plenty of keep to spare and want to buy, expecting to take advantage of other people’s difficulties, I find stores at what seems a prohibitive price.
Farming nowadays seems to me to partake very much of the character of pure gambling, and though I have money at the bank, a lot of hay to spare and more roots than anyone about in proportion to the stock I now have, it seems to me just as much of a gamble to buy in at the prices now prevailing as it would be to buy shares in the De Beers mine on the hope of Kimberley being soon relieved. The margin of profit in fanning is now so low and so uncertain if things go well, as compared with the certainty of loss if things go ill, that there is no inducement to do more than just keep things going with as little outlay as possible, and though it is or was always considered bad farming to sell hay off poor land, I shall, though the land is my own, do it without hesitation if I get the chance.
My father, for many years of his life, was always putting capital into his land in the shape of purchased food, manure, labour and so-called improvements of every kind, and now, after fifty years of such farming, the land will not grow half as much corn or a third as much grass in an average season as lots of the so-called poor land in Essex or Hampshire, which has been hard cropped as long as anyone can remember and had little or nothing spent on it.
The old saying that land is a good bank to put your money into, whether true in old times, is certainly untrue of much of the land in England to-day, and though it takes a long time to get people to see it, I am certain that many landowners who have money to spend are now spending a great deal more on their land than it will ever repay, unless we have a complete change in the conditions of English life and prices.
It is, however, necessary to go down to Essex and make some arrange¬ ments in the absence of my manager, and this I do with greater pleasure because the weather, after a long spell of alternate frost, snow and heavy rain, has now cleared up, and though I can stand as much bad weather as most people, yet my island farm is a place which is wonderfully improved in winter by fine weather.
On this part of the Essex coast it seems to rain less than almost anywhere in England, and during the four years I have been endeavouring to convert this farm from a state of thorough neglect into a rent-paying concern, we have never till now had the land really wet. The road, for the last two miles to the ferry, is in an awful state, and it seems scandalous that one should have to pay elevenpence in the pound highway rates and get nothing for it. But this is just one of the cases where individuals have to suffer on account of our system of local self-government. I cannot, even if I would, repair and maintain two miles of road through another man’s land at my own cost, and to get the interested parties to combine and
