spend as little as possible, growing what the seasons and the land will produce as cheaply as possible, and in fact never spending a shilling unless I see a very good chance of getting back one and sixpence, I can at least make both ends meet, and if I do not make much in a good year I do not lose much in a bad one.
It has come home to me by slow degrees that all the skill, all the science, all the labour, all the capital, which you may put into middling and poor land will produce no return unless the season is favourable. Recurrent droughts, long snowy winters, floods, wet summers and harsh cold springs, alternating with one another, have checked the desire to farm high, which I suppose every man with capital, energy and a love for the work has when he begins farming. As Professor Wallace of Edinburgh Uni¬ versity had the courage to tell his students, it is not the farmer who grows the biggest crops and breeds the best stock who is now the best farmer. We do not farm out of a philanthropic desire to feed the country below cost price, as many people seem to imagine: nor do many of us breed animals solely to look at, as a good many of the public, by the modern system of showing, encourage us to do. Therefore the man who employs many labourers at good wages, has many fine horses and fat cows, and may, by spending £1 to get 15s., and by growing on an acre £10 worth of corn at a cost of £10 10s., be a far worse farmer than a man who scratches the earth in a primitive way and lets his stock live on what the land naturally produces, if he produces on an acre £1 worth of produce at a cost of 18s.
This is the tendency, and a rapidly growing one, of the rising generation of owners and occupiers of middling and poor land. Many of them are, and have been for years, living to some extent on the capital invested by their predecessors in buildings, fences, drains and work of many kinds, which in former times were profitable improvements but now only too often turn out a loss. Taught by experience, the rising generation does not and will not continue such an expenditure. The country gets steadily poorer, and as the buildings and cottages get more and more dilapidated land continues to go out of cultivation, local tradesmen and the small businesses of millers, blacksmiths and harness makers gradually die out or emigrate to towns from lack of local support, and the villages fall into the condition in which so many are now found where no landowner having means and a source of income outside his landed interest lives, and where there is nothing to keep the lads and young men and girls from going as soon as they are old enough to earn a living.
This state of things is not a picture drawn by a special correspondent who is sent out to write up the preconceived ideas of his editor. It is a sad though true picture of many English villages today. Only two in¬ fluences are at work to check it, on which I shall have a good deal to say.
By Michaelmas ’86 I had no less than five large farms, amounting altogether to about 2,500 acres, in hand. Either the rents which were offered for them were so low or the would-be takers so undesirable, that I thought it better to keep them in hand for a bit till I knew what they really were worth, and then only to let such parts as I had found were
capable of growing fair crops in ordinary seasons. A great deal of my
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