42 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



cannot fail to improve our agricultural position greatly. 

 However, up to the time of Lord Selborne's accession we 

 cannot be said to have possessed anything in the shape of 

 a national agricultural policy. We have had excellent 

 men labouring at the Board of Agriculture. And they 

 have accomplished much valuable sectional work. Their 

 pubhcist activity, among other things, though not nearly as 

 substantial and as varied as that of the sister Department 

 at Washington, must have proved highly stimulating. But 

 there was no one idea, no settled programme running through 

 the Board's work, governing the whole, no indication of 

 any fixed, clearly visualised aim, and there have been times 

 when one felt strongly tempted to agree with the late Duke 

 of Richmond and Gordon who, as President of the Privy 

 Council, publicly observed, with reference to the demand 

 then grown popular for a ]Ministry of Agriculture, on the 

 very eve of its creation, that no such change was needed. 

 " There is a Minister of Agriculture ; / am the Minister 

 of Agriculture."^ I was privileged to hear the annual 

 statements of the Clerk of the Privy Council, the late Sir 

 C. L. Peel, to the farmers of his district in Sussex. And 

 taking together what he told us and what Sir J. Caird and 

 his colleagues were doing in St. James' Square, it really 

 seemed as if — barring the " muzzling of dogs," of which 

 Mr. ChapHn, on explaining in the House of Commons the 

 intended functions of his new office, made so great a feature 

 — quite as much, or nearly as much was likely to be proved 

 to have been done without the new Board as with it. Mr. 

 Hanbury subsequently owned himself warmly in sympathy 

 with Co-operative Organisation. (Mr. Chaplin had walked 

 out briskly the moment that that subject came to be taken 

 by the Royal Commission of 1894.) But that did not for- 

 ward matters much. His successor. Lord Lincolnshire, 

 manifested his love for Co-operation by bodily swallowing 

 up the Society formed to organise it and incorporate it — 



1 This was said at one of the semi-annnal meetings of the Royal 

 Agricultural Society, in response to a vote of thanks to the Duke 

 as President of that body, which had been placed in my hands. 



