FARMING IN OLDEN TIMES. 19 



beginning of the nineteenth century. In any case, we 

 know that in 1912 only 13 per cent, of the agricultural 

 holdings of England and Wales were owned by their 

 occupiers, a proportion which is probably very much less 

 than it was a century ago. 



In the "thirties," at the beginning of what we have 

 come to term the " Victorian age," rural England re- 

 covered from its depression, shook itself free from ancient 

 shackles, and began to feel the full impulse of the modern 

 spirit. 



There are proofs on all sides (wrote Philip Pusey in 1839, in 

 the opening paper of the Journal of the Royal Agricultural 

 Society), whether in the local societies which are springing up 

 in every country, in the fanners' clubs which are being formed, 

 the new machines which are invented, new manures, and new 

 varieties of seed which are announced above all, and prac- 

 tically, in the improving face of the country, which show that 

 the British farmer is not liable to the charge of being blindly 

 attached to ancient practice, but is ready, with the caution, 

 however, which befits a man whose livelihood is in agriculture, 

 as well as his pleasure, to adopt improvements in his art, and 

 even to seek for them that the spirit of inquiry is afloat. 1 



The reign of Queen Victoria began in the midst of a 

 transition stage from one state of social and industrial 

 development to another. 



Roughly speaking, the first thirty-seven years of the new 

 reign formed an era of advancing prosperity and progress, of 

 rising rents and profits, of the rapid multiplication of fer- 

 tilising agencies, of an expanding area of corn cultivation, of 

 more numerous, better-bred, better-fed, better-housed stock, 

 of varied improvements in every kind of implements and 

 machinery, of growing expenditure on the making of the land 

 by drainage, the construction of roads, the erection of farm 

 buildings, and the division into fields of convenient size. So 

 far as the standard of the highest farming is concerned, 

 agriculture has made but little advance since the " fifties." * 



Some years ago 3 I laid be-fore the Farmers' Club a 



1 " On the Present State of the Science of Agriculture in 

 England," Journal R.A.S.E., Vol. I., 1839, p. 21. 



" English Farming, Past and Present," p. 346. 

 3 See " Agriculture under Free Trade," p. 21. 



C 2 



