SHORTCOMINGS OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



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are a chosen people. Nature has gifted them with a searching 

 and discriminating mind. And they have this advantage 

 standing to their credit. Their gregariousness and ready 

 imitativeness help to animate the whole body. Our best 

 farmers are every bit as good as theirs, if not better. But 

 they possess no leavening power. They do not seem to care 

 about leavening. And they have no mass of men to follow 

 them. The bad farmer " on the other side of the hedge " 

 looks on indifferently and callously as his better skilled 

 neighbour produces wonders of high farming, and goes on 

 growing his stringy couch and his exuberant " kelk " the 

 same as before. In Germany — where, as among the Athenians 

 every one habitually looks out " for some new thing " — 

 once the leader leads, the army follows in close formation 

 and so covers the land in little time. The national addiction 

 to Education — more mechanical and more pedantic than 

 ours, but for the present purpose particularly useful as 

 being searching — prompted the effect. Farmers were ' ' out ' ' 

 for improving Agriculture. And so they asked themselves 

 the question : If one cwt. of a certain fertiliser produces 

 a certain result, where previously nothing was bestowed, 

 will not two cwts. double that improvement ? Chemistry 

 helped them to select the right fertilisers, and experience 

 showed them that not only would the second cwt. — within 

 certain limits — double the effect of the first, but under 

 some conditions it would do more still. Combination with 

 other fertilising elements would add to its efficacy. In 

 this way from our " high " farming they rose to the higher 

 level of " intensive " farming which, accompanied by that 

 careful tilling in which the division of land and the previous 

 abundance of labour, leaving behind it a tradition of careful 

 hand cultivation, assisted them, has yielded those admirable 

 results which ]\Ir. Middleton has placed on record. In 

 this practice their official leader in a time of specific progi"ess, 

 the Minister Dr. Friedenthal, set them an encouraging and 

 magnetic example. So assisted by Chemistry, the Germans 

 came to discover that even their erst barren sand — the 

 " sandy sand," as one of their leaders farming upon it, 

 Herr von Wangenheim, has expressly called it — is not the 



