SCOPE OF THE INQUIRY 5 



farmers,' who, with the decline of wheat-growing, found 

 their occupation gone, and the ' working farmer,' who is 

 taking their place, has not contradicted them. He is 

 too busy a man to spend his time in writing letters to 

 the newspapers ! 



Nor have official reports and statistics afforded much 

 enlightenment on the particular matters here under 

 review. Whether the difficulties of collecting the in- 

 formation were regarded as too great to be undertaken 

 by a State department, or whether the matters in 

 question were not thought of sufficient importance to 

 warrant official notice, is more than I can say. But 

 this fact I realized at the very outset of my own inquiry : 

 that to ascertain what was going on in the directions 

 indicated it would, in most cases, be necessary to visit 

 personally almost every district which came into con- 

 sideration at all, and seek for myself at first hand the 

 information I wanted. 



This course I have pursued, so far as time and oppor- 

 tunity allowed ; but, in the circumstances, I wish the 

 reader clearly to understand that in the pages which 

 follow I make no attempt to give a complete survey of 

 the present state of British agriculture in regard even 

 to subsidiary crops and alternative industries. What, 

 as an individual inquirer, I have had to be content to 

 do is to gather in such facts and figures as would indicate 

 sufficiently the changes that have been going on, and 

 the magnitude of the developments that have already 

 taken place, hoping thereby to promote a greater degree 

 of public confidence in the continued vitality and the 

 widened possibilities of British agriculture (using that 

 word in its broadest sense), notwithstanding the period 

 of depression of which the effects have certainly not 

 yet entirely disappeared. 



The restoration of such a feeling of confidence is of 



