256 RURAL RECONSTRUCTION 



inborn love of movement and sport have kept in vogue — to " inten- 

 sive " farming, which relies more on the use of the plough and the 

 harrow, the spade and the hoe, than on precipitations from the sky. 

 Even in the United States, the chosen home and nursery of labour- 

 saving machinery, under the pressure of intensified husbandry, the 

 call for more manual labour has to such an extent asserted itself 

 that between 1900 and 1910 the average acreage falling to the share 

 of one person among the people employed in agriculture has fallen 

 from eighty-one to seventy. Late in the day the possibility of this 

 has been tellingly demonstrated in the Harper Adams College 

 experiments at Newport in Shropshire, which experiments have 

 rightly excited not a little interest. There has been a good deal of 

 outlay on labour there. But the Times correspondent reports that 

 the Harper Adams College authorities do not find the cost thereby 

 imposed excessive. The costly labour employed has proved to be 

 labour which repays itself with interest by results — such as " have 

 surpassed expectation." It must really seem surprising that only 

 now we should have made the discovery which neighbours of ours — 

 not by any means in Germany alone — have made decades ago, 

 namely, that arable land — where the nature of the soil indicates 

 cultivation with the plough as recommendable — may be made to 

 yield considerably larger profits and much more produce than 

 " lazy " pasturing ; and that not only in the shape of cereal crops, 

 such as our heart is now set upon, but also, and indeed to an even 

 larger extent, in the production of green and fodder crops resulting 

 in meat, wool and milk ; and that cows, when kept in their byres, 

 will yield at least as much milk, aye and more too, than when 

 pastured in the open. All this our neighbours learnt long ago, in 

 the best agricultural districts of the Continent, where farmers kept 

 wondering at our wasteful antiquated practices. However, all this 

 remunerative farming requires a larger amount of labour. The 

 Harper Adams College experiment may claim the distinctive merit of 

 having at length brought such knowledge home to us, and of teaching 

 us that, with the sparing allowance on cultivable land allotted to us, 

 we must — necessarily must, in our own interest — advance at length 

 from the pastural stage of civilisation to the cultural. We cannot 

 any longer afford to waste our agricultural resources. We must now 

 put our best leg forward. Our pastured cows will necessarily have 

 to become accustomed to foregoing the free range of the pasture — 

 which has its rough side in winter — and to be content with the 

 stable. They will do so, as their sister kine have done abroad. That 

 is one of the changes coming over our agriculture. And if, on the 



