414 A FARMER'S YEAR 



below a certain unprofitable price — say 2^os. a quarter — a moderate 

 bounty should be paid from the Imperial Exchequer to those who 

 continue to grow it. Probably it is futile to expect that such a 

 measure will be adopted except under the stern compulsion of 

 conditions which we cannot foresee, and perhaps this also may be 

 held to savour of Protection. Still, it will be admitted that in view 

 of national and other contingencies, it is not to the interest of the 

 country that wheat should go out of cultivation, or indeed that 

 the present area under that crop should be further contracted. 

 Nor is it to the interest of the country that the classes who w-ere 

 wont to be employed in its production at a profit, and who for 

 generations have been the backbone of England, should, for the 

 lack of a reasonable wage, which under present circumstances it 

 is impossible to pay them, be driven from the land that bore them 

 and herded together in the towns.' 



This letter has produced a third article, wherein I am held up 

 as one reprobate, and told that ' a noble scorn of consequence ' 

 is preferable by far to ' a spirit of stealthy opportunism.' 



Well, I am a person acquainted with criticism ; indeed, there 

 are few epithets, angry or disparaging, that have not at one time 

 or another landed upon my appointed head, but never before has 

 it been suggested, as I understand this writer to suggest, that I 

 am a stealthy opportunist. From no such failing as this, O 

 Scribe, have I suffered chiefly in the past, but rather from a ten- 

 dency to enter on rash ventures and crusades and to indulge in 

 speech undiplomatically plain. Surely, too, as a matter of argu- 

 ment, my position could better have been defined as stealthily 

 opportunistic if, hiding my real views, for this reason or for that, 

 I had pretended to change them. But I make no such pretence ; 

 I say only that it is useless to continue to urge publicly — by which 

 I mean in platform speeches, and especially in addresses to rural 

 audiences — what the electorate rejects ; and further, that the 

 advocacy of any measure of protection, however just it may seem 

 to some, is so misinterpreted and exaggerated, that it is perhaps 

 best to leave the thing alone. For instance, during niy election 



