NOTES in 



removed from party politics. The present Board of Agriculture is hopeless — 

 a Royal Commission could do no worse. A new Board should be formed, not 

 unlike, in constitution, the Royal Agricultural Society, composed of men who 

 farm and have farmed and of those who are engaged in the scientific investigation 

 of agricultural problems. Unless both science and practice are represented in 

 this Board there will be a repetition of the futile practice by which party catch- 

 words are transformed into agricultural policy. Nothing could have been more 

 foolish than the cry of "back to the land," nothing more chimerical than the 

 propaganda of small holdings. These were pushed by the idle hands supported 

 at the Board of Agriculture, with the assistance of a servile press. With very few 

 exceptions, small holdings, other than market gardens, are foredoomed to failure. 

 They require more capital per acre to farm them, they allow but little respite 

 from eternal drudgery, and, ceteris paribus, a big farm well farmed is always 

 better than a little farm likewise well farmed. This, too, is apparently the opinion 

 of Sir A. D. Hall, who, on pages 136 and 137 of his Pilgrimage of British 

 Farming observes, " The good land was divided into large farms ; small holdings 

 did not exist upon it, nor in all probability could they pay the rent that would be 

 demanded, because no small holder could hope to rival the pitch of productiveness 

 to which the land had been raised on the present system." 



England will not be turned into an earthly Eden via the market garden. 

 That the old adage — 



He who by the plough would thrive 

 Himself must either hold or drive, 



is not literally true, is obvious, but the truth that underlies it is clear. We must 

 have a Board of Agriculture that knows something about farming, a body of 

 scientific workers who will be ready to assist with criticism, based upon under- 

 standing and sympathy for the farmer's difficulties. Such, briefly, are the chief 

 points which seem, in the opinion of the present writer, to require attention in the 

 immediate future. The Art and Science of agriculture are not to be divided : 

 they form a whole, for science is in agriculture just as the salt is in solution, 

 requiring only the reagency of scientific insight. The ultimate decision on any 

 course in agriculture rests on the judgment of the man on the spot. The better 

 equipped his mind, the more likelihood of sound judgment. The future of the 

 country should rest with agriculture. 



British Scientific Products Exhibition 



The British Science Guild, under the Presidentship of the Rt. Hon. Lord 

 Sydenham, G.C.S.I., G.C.M.G., G.B.E., F.R.S., is organising a comprehensive 

 exhibition of products and appliances of scientific and industrial interest which 

 prior to the war were obtained chiefly from enemy countries but are now 

 produced in the United Kingdom. His Majesty the King has graciously con- 

 sented to become Patron of the exhibition, and the Marquess of Crewe, K.G., is 

 President. Among the Vice-Presidents are : the Prime Minister ; Mr. Winston 

 Churchill, Minister of Munitions ; Sir Albert Stanley, President of the Board of 

 Trade ; Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education ; Dr. Addison, 

 Minister of Reconstruction ; Lord Moulton ; Lord Sydenham ; Sir J. J. Thomson, 

 President of the Royal Society ; and other distinguished public men. 



The exhibition, which will be held at King's College from about the first week 

 in August until the first week in September, will show in the first place products 

 chiefly imported from Germany before the war, but now made in this country ; but 



