CHAPTER XXII
FARMING EXPERIENCES IN THE COTSWOLDS
It is always unpleasant after one has given a great deal of time, attention and trouble during the best years of one’s life to have to confess that the only result has been the acquisition of a great deal of experience at a very heavy outlay, but such has been my case as regards Agriculture, When the decline in the profits of farming, which began about 1875 and has continued without intermission for twenty-five years, first resulted in the giving up of their farms by tenants who, according to their lights, had done their best to make both ends meet and failed, I was about as ignorant of the practice and principles of agriculture as any other young man of my class and education, who had hunted and shot over his paternal acres and kept his eyes open* I thought that I could do as others had done and as my father had done with more or less success. I realised at the time no better than thousands of more far-seeing, cleverer and better educated men than myself, that almost all the conditions under which the practice and customs of the country had grown up, and which had resulted in a great rise in the income and expenditure of both tenants and land- owners during the twenty years which succeeded the Crimean War, were going to be permanently changed.
When, therefore, my father told me in the autumn of 1878 that his trusted steward was obliged to give up a large farm that he had long occupied, and that he wanted my assistance to manage it, I entered on the matter with a light heart. My father, like most other country gentle¬ men of his time, had always looked on a farm as a necessary part of his occupations and pleasures, and whether it was 300 or 1,000 acres did not very much matter. He had besides his agent a bailiff who had been brought up in the same school, who considered it his duty never to dis¬ agree with his employer, who was as careless as most wealthy landowners whether he spent a few hundreds more or less on his farm provided that good hay and oats were supplied to the stables, good mutton and butter to the house, and that when he took a fancy to show a bull, a horse or a pen of sheep, the animals exhibited were at least good enough for him to think they ought to have won if the judges knew their business. Pigs were this worthy’s great hobby, and as my father dearly loved a pig either in the sty or on the table, they hit it off admirably. The financial results at the end of the year were not too narrowly criticised, and if a few hundreds had to be put to the farm account to make up a deficiency there was always an increase in the valuation and excellent reasons for the loss. The men as well as the horses went "gently on" and nobody said much if their watches were twenty minutes or half an hour slow in the morning, and if they spent a good deal of time on a wet day smoking under a rick, as long as they came home sober from market and did not mind staying out late when there was a push of work, at haymaking or harvest; and as long as the horses, cattle and sheep looked well, neither the men, the cake bills nor the accounts were ever severely criticised either by my father or his steward.
278
