PEDIGREE BREEDING 71 



is very scanty, the knowledge of existing conditions is still less 

 diffused among our population. I once addressed about 180 men 

 and women who were teachers in our rural elementary schools. 

 The gathering expressed some dissent at certain remarks I made 

 about the teaching in our village schools being given with little 

 or no sympathy towards agriculture. When my turn came to 

 reply to the various criticisms that had been made, I asked a 

 question myself. It referred to their teaching of history. 

 I invited all those who had included anything about the work 

 of Robert Bakewell in their history lessons to hold up their 

 hands. Only three hands were held up! More than 175 out 

 of 1 80 rural teachers had to confess they had never mentioned 

 his name to their pupils. If this was the state of affairs, about 

 1910, among the instructors of children about to spend their 

 lives among cattle and sheep, it is easy to imagine that the boys 

 and girls at our secondary and public schools had no better 

 enlightenment about rural history. It is probably true to say 

 that the vast majority of Englishmen of the last generation lived 

 and died without ever having heard of Bakewell, Townsend or 

 Tull, the three men who, between 1720 and 1780, made our 

 agriculture the best example to all husbandmen in the world, 

 and the first of whom has brought millions of money from 

 overseas into the national exchequer. 



I lay great stress upon the unfortunate ignorance that has 

 prevailed among all classes about the work of these great men, 

 for this ignorance was largely responsible for the terrible state 

 of affairs prevailing in 1914, that allowed our enemy to threaten 

 us with starvation while we were living amid fertile, but almost 

 uncultivated fields. The exceptions, the cultivated fields, 

 showed by their very excellence how much the strictly limited 

 amount of our national land might have been made to produce 

 by universally good farming. In times when we least wished 

 to let the enemy hamper our military effort, fighting material 

 was necessarily sacrificed so that the shameful neglect of the 

 past might be remedied with a slowness born of hurry. If 

 the educationalists of the past two generations had deemed 

 agriculture worthy of their attention, how much loss of blood 

 and treasure through U-boats might they not have saved ? 



