206 THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE 



large farms, large capital, long leases, and the most improved 

 methods of cultivation and stock-breeding. His object was to 

 develop to the utmost the resources of the soil. To this end all 

 social considerations must be subordinated. Every obstacle to good 

 farming must be swept away wastes reclaimed, commons divided, 

 open-fields converted into individual occupations, antiquated 

 methods abandoned, obsolete implements scrapped, improved 

 practices uniformly adopted. " Where," he asks, with perfect 

 truth, " is the little farmer to be found who will cover his whole 

 farm with marl at the rate of 100 or 150 tons per acre ? who will 

 drain all his land at the expense of 2 or 3 an acre ? who will pay 

 a heavy price for the manure of towns, and convey it thirty miles 

 by land carriage ? who will float his meadows at the expense of 

 5 an acre ? who, to improve the breed of his sheep, will give 1000 

 guineas for the use of a single ram for a single season ? who will 

 send across the Kingdom to distant provinces for new implements, 

 and for men to use them ? who will employ and pay men for residing 

 in provinces where practices are found which they want to intro- 

 duce into their farms ? " 



Young's spirited crusade against bad or poor farming would 

 probably have fallen on deaf ears, if it had not been supported by 

 the prospect of financial gain and by the impulse of industrial 

 necessities. As he put the case, more produce from the land 

 meant higher rents for the landlord, larger incomes for farmers, 

 better wages for labourers, more home-grown food for the nation. 

 Under the pressure of war-prices and of the gigantic growth of a 

 manufacturing population, the system which he advocated made 

 rapid progress. Years after his death, it was established with such 

 completeness that men forgot not only the existence of any different 

 conditions, but even the very name of the most active pioneer of 

 the change. In the agricultural literature of the early and middle 

 Victorian era, he is almost ignored. The article on English agri- 

 culture in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, devotes only 

 a few lines to his career. Recently his memory has been revived 

 in England by the renewal under different circumstances of the 

 struggle between large and small farmers. In France, on the other 

 hand, where the contest between capitalist farmers and peasant pro- 

 prietors was never decisively terminated, the discussion has always 

 centred round his name. In the words of Lesage, his latest editor 

 and translator, France has made an adopted child of Arthur Young. 



