1 90 AGRICULTURE. 



and that a large portion of her imports came as tribute, 

 without much return. Probably the want of easy means 

 of transport prevented the agricultural use of the manures 

 which might have been economised in the towns. In the 

 absence of such aid the constant repetition of corn crops, 

 aggravated, in many cases, by a systematic robbery of the 

 arable field for the sake of the more profitable vineyard, 

 produced the state of exhaustion to which the progressive 

 diminution of return so fully testifies. 



No point in agriculture is better established than that 

 long rest (what the Romans called " longa desidia ") in grass 

 gives to land renewed, or increased, powers of producing 

 crops when it is again restored to culture. No fact is so 

 entirely unexplained. None so palpably contradicts all our 

 maxims. Here is no tillage, no stirring up, no exposure 

 to light or air, no succession of crops. What becomes of 

 the doctrine that the roots of plants exude something which 

 is noxious to their own species ? A field is laid down in 

 grass, and every year it exports something ; beef, mutton, 

 wool, milk or bone, sinew, and muscle, in the shape of 

 store cattle.* Coexistent with a continuous export is the 

 anomalous fact of increased productive power. Of this 

 remedy for exhaustion we have availed ourselves largely. 

 Our extensive pastures are our storehouses of grain our 

 safeguard against protracted dearth. Serious alarm would 

 soon cover them with grain again. Our history teems with 

 protests and futile laws against the increase of pasture. 

 The process was inevitable : agriculture was rebelling 

 against exhaustion, and was adopting the only remedy which 

 difficulties of transport then permitted ; a remedy of which 



* We have no inclination to discredit the statement that a marked 

 declension of cheese produce occurred in the old dairy lands of Cheshire, 

 and was arrested by the application of bone manure, nor to throw any 

 doubt on the chemical explanations which have been given of those 

 circumstances. We may mention, however, that in the great midland 

 cheese-making district, to which parts of five counties contribute, and 

 in which the generality of the cow pastures have been from time im- 

 memorial unviolated by the plough, we never heard of any such declen- 

 sion or remedy. 



