370 HIGH FARMING, 1837-1874 



driven barn-machinery, which threshed the corn, raised the straw 

 to the loft, winnowed and dressed the grain, divided it according to 

 quality, dehvered it into sacks ready for market, and set aside the 

 taihngs for pigs and poultry. Nor did mechanical science neglect 

 the hve-stock industry, the development of which, in connection with 

 corn-growing, was a feature of the period. Here, too, machinery 

 economised the farmer's labour. He already knew the turnip-cutter 

 and the chaff-cutter ; but now the same engine which superseded 

 the flail, pumped his water, ground his corn, crushed his cake, split 

 his beans, cut his chaff, pulped his turnips, steamed and boiled his 

 food. Without the aid of mechanical invention farming tq;;^day 

 would-be at an absolute standstill. No farmer could find, or if he 

 found could pay, the staff of scarce and expensive labour without 

 which in 1837 agricultural produce could not be raised, secured, and 

 marketed. 



The improvements which have been indicated were not the work 

 of a day. On the contrary, during the first few years of the reign — 

 the only period passed under Protection — progress was neither 

 rapid nor unchecked. Farmers in general were preparing for high 

 farming ; they had not yet adopted its practices. Whatever 

 advance had been made between 1837 and 1846 was probably lost 

 in the five succeeding years. Abundant materials exist for com- 

 parison. On the one side are the Reports of the Reporters to the old 

 Board of Agriculture (1793-1815) ; and the Reports to the successive 

 Commissions (1815-36) ; on the other, there are the Reports 

 published in the early numbers of the Journal of the Royal Agri- 

 cultural Society, the .evidence given before the Select Committee 

 of 1848 on tenant-right and agricultural customs, the letters of Caird 

 to The Times in 1850-1, afterwards embodied in his English Agri- 

 culture in 1850-1, and the letters of the Commissioner to the Morning 

 Chronicle during the same period. It is plain that in 1846 n o 

 vunive^sai progress had been_effected ; that many landowners had 

 made no effort to increase the productiveness of their land ; that 

 high farming; was still the exceptions that the new resource s were 

 not yet generally utilised ; an3~that more than half the owners and 

 occupiers of the land had made but Httle advance on the ideas and 

 practices of the eighteenth century. Another period of disaster, 

 short but severe, forced home the necessary lessons, and ushered in 

 the t en yea rs, 1853-62, which were the p^olden age of EngUsh agri- 

 culture. 



