PROGRESS OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. 229 



the fold, would tread down the lambs," though no such accident had ever been 

 heard of, " and that the lambs would not be able to find their dams in a large 

 fold," though certainly, says Young, " a lamb in Dorsetshire has as much 

 sense as a lamb elsewhere." Whether the method had been beneficial or 

 not, the grounds for rejecting it were equally absurd. Of two neighboring 

 counties one was somecimes a century behind the other. A lazy desire to 

 creep with sluggish monotony along an established path, and a feeling of im- 

 patience at being pushed into a novel track, helped to maintain hereditary 

 prejudices, and tenants invented fanciful excuses for not doing what was 

 plainly advantageous to be done, because they preferred present sloth to future 

 profit. They were like a man who had lain upon one side till he shrunk from 

 the trouble of turning over to the other, though when the process was per- 

 formed the new posture might be easier than the old. But once roused and 

 put in motion, and the inherent reluctance to stir being overcome, the gain in 

 interest as well as in pocket was felt to be great. He who has profited by one 

 innovation is ready to try another, and his pride and his pleasure is to im- 

 prove where his fathers gloried in resisting improvement. There are still 

 large districts of England which have yet to be converted to a rational system 

 of agriculture — landlords who are ignorant of the principles of management 

 which attract or create intelligent tenants — and tenants who are ignorant of 

 the methods by which the land is made to double its increase. But the wave 

 of agricultural progress has acquired irresistible might, and they must mount 

 it or it will sweep them away. The best thing which can be done for these 

 laggards in the race is to persuade them to take in an agricultural newspaper, 

 to get them to consult the commercial travelers who collect orders for the 

 manufacturers of artificial manures, to talk them into replenishing their worn 

 out implements from the mart of the great makers, to prevail on them to visit 

 the annual shows of the Koyal Agricultural Society, to throw them, in short, 

 in the way of seeing the products of advanced husbandry, and of hearing the 

 ideas of enlightened cultivators. By some or all of these means they may be 

 put upon the high-road to improvement, and when they have gone an inch 

 there is little fear, unless they are afflicted by a hopeless incapacity, that they 

 will refuse to go the ell. He who lives within the diameter of a little circle 

 Las ideas as narrow as his horizon, but the influence of numbers and skill 

 together is irresistible, and no impersonation of ignorance or bigotry has prob- 

 ably ever visited a single great agricultuial exhibition without returning a 

 wiser and a better farmer. 



