557 
AGRICULTURE IN THE OLD WORLD. 
The following condensed exhibit of a few salient points in foreign ag- 
ricultural statistics, accompanied with indications of prevailing agri- 
cultural tendencies at the present time, prepared by the Statistician of 
this Department, was read before the New York Rural Club, and is 
given in connection with more extended statistics of European agricul- 
ture, to be printed in this and succeeding numbers of the Monthly Re- 
port: 
It would be presumption in me, after a hasty glance at the fields and vineyards of a 
few of the countries of Europe, to attempt a portrayal of even the prominent features 
of European agriculture. I will only indicate briefly the leading impressions received, 
supported by a few illustrative facts. Nor do I care to indulge in the egotism of per- 
sonal adventure, or details of rural description, preferring, as the theme is so broad 
and the time so short, to epitomize a few of the dominating facts which illustrate the 
variety, the extent, and the prevailing tendency of rural production, even at the risk 
of heaviness from the gravity of a freightage of statistics. 
As no true American comes in contact with the civilization, the institutions, the poli- 
tics of Europe, without brightening his patriotism and intensifying his appreciation of 
home capabilities and attainments, so a view of European agriculture, ripe with the 
fruitage of time and effort, thongh almost everywhere displaying parasitic and injuri- 
ous growth of the fungus of feudalism, only brings into favorable contrast our own 
agriculture, superior already in the fitness of its mechanism, and in the intelligence of 
its labor, as in the fertility of its lands, and in the range of its production. While so 
much may be said of the present, it belongs to the future to refine what is crude, to 
systematize what is chaotic, to perfect what is primitive. A statistical glancé at the 
conditions and results of agricultural labor in several nationalities will render more 
intelligent an attempt to compare the status of agriculture of one country with that 
of another or our own. 
Great Britain.—England, Scotland, and Wales, known together as Great Britain, a 
manufacturing and commercial country, in which but six per cent. of the population 
are actually employed in agriculture, furnish an example of the cleanest culture, the 
most rational processes, the most extensive use of money in permanent improvements 
and in fertilization, and the highest rate of production known to the industry of 
Europe and ofthe world. In some of these respects Holland is only exceeded slightly, 
if at all. While the land isheld too tightly in the clutches of the dead and of the 
titled living, itis gratifying to see that the people are wresting to their own use even 
the smallest parcels of it. While, according to the official enumeration of 1870, only 
46 per cent. of the “ holdings” or farms exceed 20 acres each, they occupied 91 per cent. 
of the total area returned ; 28 per cent occupied 20 to 100 acres each, and 18 per cent. 
above 100 acres each. In 1871 the area cultivated in holdings from one-fourth of an 
acre to 20 acres was but 1,897,000 acres, out of 30,838,000, or six per cent.; but they 
carried 11 per cent. of the cattle of the country, and 25 per cent. of the swine. It was 
found in 1872 that there were 60,944 holdings of one-fourth of an acre to an acre in ex- 
tent, of which 67,422 were in England, and of that number 49,000 were allotments held 
by agricultural laborers and workingmen. This practice of alloting land for the use 
of laborers is making rapid increase. 
The total area of Great Britain is 56,964,260 acres, of which England comprises 
32,590,397—the whole scarcely equal to the area of two of our Western States of aver- 
age size. The population to be supported, 26,000,000, is one to rather more than two 
acres; in England, one to 14 acres; and yet little more than half of the total area, 
31,000, 000 of acres, is in cultivation, nearly 24,000,000 of which is in England proper. 
A key to agricultural prosperity is found in the fact that not exceeding one-third of 
the occupied area is allotted to exhaustive crops, as the cereals; while two-thirds are 
given to restorative crops, as roots, clover, and grasses in rotation, and permanent pas- 
ture. The proportions last season were, for the whole country, 30.9 per cent. in grain 
crops, 11.6 in green crops, 14.5 in clover and grasses, and 40.6 in permanent pasture. 
The production of meat is the first object of British agriculture; the growing of 
wheat is the consideration of next importance. Both cattle and sheep are well known 
to excel all others in meat production, attaining greater weight in a given time than 
continental animals. ‘The official average of net weight of carcasses of British cattle 
of all ages is 600 pounds; of cattle imported, 500 pounds; of British sheep and lambs, 
60 pounds ; of imported, 50 pounds. The present tendency is to the increase of live 
