FIFTY YEARS OF A SHOWMAN'S LIFE 



the last fifty years. In looking back through 

 this vista of time, one can see, by contrast, the 

 impress left by the great changes of the nineteenth 

 century upon the individual character of the 

 British farmer especially. The development of 

 railways, steamships and telegraphs ; the increased 

 adaptation of machinery to farming operations ; 

 the application of scientific principles to the culti- 

 vation of the land all these factors have tended 

 to obliterate distinct types of character among 

 farmers, as well as among representatives of other 

 callings, in favour of uniformity. No doubt this 

 has been a gain in some respects, inasmuch as it 

 has resulted in a greater consistency and reason- 

 ableness of disposition, and in the formation of a 

 broader outlook with respect to the affairs of life. 

 The farmer, nowadays, being a better-read and a 

 more-travelled man, is more competent to hold his 

 own in the world at large, and is regarded in a 

 much less degree as the embodiment of a distinct 

 class, with manners, customs and traditions of its 

 own, and having little affinity with those of the 

 workers in cities and towns. At the same time, 

 we have lost something in picturesqueness, and in 

 those phases of character, born of the soil and 

 fostered by the comparative isolation of living, 

 which was the lot of the agriculturist under the 

 old condition of things. In him the novelist and 

 dramatist found materials ready to hand, and 

 requiring but little touching up for their pictures 

 of the country-side. The farmer was invariably 

 drawn by the writers of those days as a combina- 

 tion of breezy heartiness, dogged obduracy, and 

 rooted antipathy to change, who always gave 



6 



