164 AN AGRICULTURAL FAGGOT. 



but whereas in France the decrease has been less than 

 9 per cent., in the United Kingdom it has been 44 per cent., 

 if we take the 1902 figures ; and nearly 56 per cent., if the 

 1904 figures are taken. Barley, on the other hand, has 

 declined rather more in France than here, while oats have 

 increased about 5 per cent, in France, and have about 

 held their own in the United Kingdom. 



There are in France, of course, certain methods of 

 farming to which we have no parallel on this side of the 

 Channel. About one-tenth in value of the whole produce 

 of the soil (and the decennial inquiry comprises a valuation 

 of all crops including grass and woodlands) is accounted 

 for by vines, while the silkworm industry is also one with 

 which we have nothing to compare. So far as ordinary 

 arable farming is concerned, the typical French system 

 as described by Arthur Young and referred to by H. M. 

 Jenkins, 1 viz., the three-course — two white crops (winter 

 corn followed by spring) and a bare fallow in the third 

 year — is still largely practised, although it appears to 

 have been now very generally modified by the substitu- 

 tion of a green crop for the bare fallow. I do not know to 

 what extent, or in what districts, this system now prevails 

 in France, but it apparently exists over a good part of 

 Normandy. Travelling by motor, we took occasion now 

 and again to stop by the wayside and interview the men 

 who were working on the land. In the country lying 

 between Abbeville and Treport, for example, we saw 

 a farmer who was occupied in cutting his wheat, his 

 wife tying after him, and the baby in a perambulator 

 sleeping peacefully in the corner of the field — if field one 

 may call a patch of ground in a wide expanse of country 

 comprising many farms without a single fence in sight. 

 He told us that his course was (1) wheat, (2) oats, (3) beet- 

 root or clover, and it seemed that this was mainly the 

 practice throughout that district. The land struck one 

 as being clean and well-managed, with that rigid economy 

 1 Report to Royal Commission on Agriculture, 1882. 



