6 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



would be desirable and out-of-place practices are perpetuated and 

 the land is hindered — as Sir Thomas Middleton has shown — from 

 yielding as full a return as might have been expected. There is 

 variety, no doubt, as an agricultural writer of authority has recently 

 well and admiringly observed. But that variety is scarcely pro- 

 nounced enough ; it does not come up to that " diversification " 

 which the United States Department of Agriculture particularly 

 recommends farmers in its country to make their steady aim, so as 

 to do full justice to all the varieties of conditions that prevail in 

 different localities, as determined by the specific qualities of soil, 

 climate and situation. Where is our — or rather Irish — cultivation 

 of flax, at a time when we want fibre badly ? Where are our fields 

 of sugar beet, the value of which as a farm crop is among ourselves 

 not fully realised ? Where are those large breaks of potatoes that 

 we might have looked for to turn into alcohol, which we greatly 

 need ? Our sun — which, as Lord Byron says, scarcely ever rises in 

 the governing portion of the Empire upon which as a whole it 

 " never sets " — will not ripen the wheat (which is indigenous to 

 Mesopotamia, but upon the production of which we have based our 

 farming practice) to the same perfection that the sun of its native 

 country, of Hungary, the Beauce, Argentina, and, above all others, 

 Canada will. Nevertheless it remains the sheet-anchor of our 

 agriculture, apart from that widely extended " lazy farming " 

 which in the case of English agriculture is a direct production of our 

 out-of-date land system, with its limitations and its covenants, its 

 unregulated selection of cultivators, and its rents fixed by " custom." 

 It is to be hoped that landlords have found their account in that 

 system. But the constant, or very frequently repeated, tinkerings 

 at our laws affecting agriculture, ever cropping up afresh, are an 

 unmistakable proof that all is not as it should be, and that the 

 grown foot requires a new last, and the grown frame a new measure- 

 ment. The old clothes hem it in and prevent its free movement. 



That rather degrading supervision which the Ministry of Agri- 

 culture has secured for itself in the latest Agricultural Act, which 

 places landlords as well as tenants in a state of tutelage, and fixes 

 upon them the stigma of not knowing their business as well as 

 a gentleman in Whitehall Place, will not mend this state of things. 



A stimulus to well-doing notoriously goes farther than a warning 

 of punishment to come for ill-doing. The cause of bad farming is, 

 as a rule, either disproportion of present working funds to the size 

 and demands of the holding, or else a want of vocational capacity. 

 In neither of these cases does the punishment threatened promise to 



