328 Mr. H. Rider Haggard i[May 8, 



wheat lie had thrashed out and handed over to his customer from the 

 the one acre that he had under that crop. 



To my astonishment he replied — and afterwards I satisfied myself 

 of the truth of the statement — nine and a half quarters ! Now I 

 consider five quarters of wheat to the acre a good crop, and six a 

 large one (indeed I do not think that 1 have ever grown so much) ; 

 nine and a half being of course phenomenal. Pursuing ray investi- 

 gations, I discovered that from a second acre of his field he had 

 secured eight quarters of oats — a splendid return ; from a third acre 

 under clover^ three tons of hay — nearly double "what I average; and 

 from the fourth acre a very heavy crop of roots — of the weight of 

 which he had kept no exact record. If only I could show similar 

 returns from the four hundred acres or so that I farm, I at least 

 should have no cause to complain of agricultural depression, even in 

 these days of low prices. 



How, then, is the mystery to be explained ? Thus. The builder 

 farms his four acres of arable much better than I do my four hundred. 

 He goes in for no out-of-the-way crops. He uses no artificial manure, 

 only that produced by his few horses, pigs, fowls and young stock, 

 with the addition of soot, which I suppose he can purchase from the 

 sweep at 6d. the bushel ; but of these dressings he does use plenty, 

 more in proportion than I do. Further, when building is slack his 

 two sons and his trade horses are continually at work upon the land, 

 in which not a weed is to be seen. Indeed I will go so far as to say 

 that if all Great Britain were cultivated as that small man cultivates 

 his four acres of plough and his two of pasture, the question of food 

 supply in time of war would no longer sit like a nightmare on the 

 national breast. For there it — or a great deal of it — would be in our 

 granaries and stockyards, or growing in our fields and pastures. 



But how is it cultivated in fact? Let any one who understands 

 the question take a drive through certain counties that I could name 

 to you and judge for himself. There he may see thousands and tens 

 of thousands of acres which used to produce four or five quarters of 

 corn to the acre, gone down to a miserable apology for pasture. 

 Indeed this laying away of land to grass, which does not produce so 

 much meat as land under crop even if the pasture be good, is one of 

 the great features of our modern husbandry, and, although I am 

 obliged to practise it myself, I may add, one of the worst. 



The result is that our output of foodstuffs, or so the Agricultural 

 Returns seem to show, is actually diminishing. It has been calcu- 

 lated that to produce the amount of food that we import, would 

 require the cultivation of another 23,000,000 acres yielding our 

 present average returns. These of course are not available. But 

 supposing that the production of the 47,800,000 acres now under 

 cultivation in the United Kingdom could be increased by nearly one- 

 half, it would seem that the same result would be attained — although 

 of course a larger area than at present would have to be devoted to 

 the growth of wheat. 



