WHAT MIGHT BE AND WHAT IS 253 



Perhaps I may be allowed to quote my own small 

 experience as an example. Within the last four 

 years, by the help of an able and enthusiastic steward, 

 I have, in stock and crop, quite doubled the produce 

 of some of the land I farm, and this without resorting 

 to any form of what I may call fancy or market garden 

 cultivation, or to the breeding of pedigree animals for 

 sale abroad. My only methods have been to apply a 

 sufficiency of money (about ;io or perhaps ^12 the 

 acre) and a sufficiency of muck, which, in the old 

 farming adage, is "the mother of money." Not that 

 I wish it to be understood that I am making con- 

 siderable profits out of farming. This, I regret to 

 say, is far from the case. I work two adjoining hold- 

 ings, one my own property and another hired, about 

 one-half of the 500 acres which I farm being rented. 

 On the first, which has been in hand for years, I have 

 just made ends meet in this disastrous year of 1910. 

 On the second, taken over at Michaelmas 1909 in the 

 usual weed-poisoned and exhausted state, I have lost 

 1 per acre, plus the interest of the capital invested, 

 which 1 the acre and interest, or most of them, have 

 vanished into the soil in the shape of extra labour and 

 manure. 



I wonder whether they will ever reappear, also, 

 sometimes, why people farm at all? The capital 

 employed would look much healthier in some foreign 

 security, say an Argentine railway. So far as I am 

 concerned, the answer to the second question is 

 really twofold. I farm because I love the land, 

 which both thought and observation tell me is the 

 bed-rock of every thing, wherein man is rooted and 

 out of which he draws all that makes him man, as 

 surely as he does the corn and beef he eats. There- 



