SCOTTISH VIEWS OF THE SITUATION 39 



chief source of wealth has now been shifted to commerce and 

 manufacture ; but the burdens on agriculture remain almost the 

 same as before. The big importing firms in the cities are taking 

 the place of the landed interests in the country, in the matter of 

 the national food-supplies ; but the former hardly know what tithe 

 and the other burdens on the land mean, while the latter know only 

 too well. Free the land of these permanent burdens, or make 

 capital and commerce pay a fairer share of them, and British agri- 

 culture would then have a better chance. As it is, we compete on 

 our own markets with foreign countries which not only enjoy all 

 the benefits of cheap transport, but impose on agriculture no such 

 burdens as we have to bear here. If only we could stand on equal 

 terms with our competitors, and especially if we could produce as 

 cheaply as they, we should have nothing to fear, and could beat 

 them easily. 



It is these permanent burdens on the land the tithe, the taxes, 

 and the ever-increasing rates that, in my opinion, constitute the 

 worst feature in the situation to-day, especially if agriculture be 

 regarded as a business in which cost of production is all-important. 

 Otherwise, I see around me in the county of Essex signs of marked 

 improvement, compared with the conditions that prevailed when I 

 first came here from Ayrshire. In my humble opinion, the decline 

 in the price of wheat had done less harm to the Essex farmer of 

 those days than his own previous prosperity. It was this which 

 gave him his fine tastes and his expensive habits, and unfitted him 

 for new conditions of agricultural production, which called for per- 

 sonal energy, arduous labour, and unremitting attention. It was 

 this prosperity which unfitted his wife and family to play that part 

 in a resort to fresh enterprises for which the wives and children of 

 our Scottish farmers and labourers were so well adapted. 



The Essex farmer of old was not equal to the fresh situation that 

 arose ; so his place has been largely taken in Essex by a new type 

 of men. Of these, many were only labourers, or little more than 

 labourers; but they started with this advantage : they came from a 

 country where class distinctions were less pronounced than in 

 England, and the labourer had better chances and higher aspira- 

 tions. In the days when the growing of wheat brought wealth, the 

 policy of the British farmer was to regard his labourers as little 

 more than part of the farm machinery. He gave them the smallest 

 wage on which they could live, and he would have scorned the 

 idea of their attempting to rise to the same social position as him- 

 self. When the awakening of the labourer came, he abandoned 

 prospects that appeared to be hopeless, went off to the towns, and 

 left the farmer to his own resources. 



In Scotland the position has been different. There the labourer's 

 children and the farmer's children sit side by side in the schools, 

 and grow up to manhood with a closer bond of sympathy between 

 them than is the case in England. The labourers, again, have 

 good gardens as much as they can cultivate. They take more 



