SHORTCOMINGS OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 7 



have been lazily resting upon our oars — it is Mr. Hall 

 who has called pasture farming " lazy farming " — Ger- 

 many by our side has been pulling vigorously ahead. 

 " If Agriculture," so stated Lord Selborne, when still 

 at the head of the Board of Agriculture, in July, 1916, 

 while addressing a gathering of farmers in Lincoln, 

 " had made no more progress in Germany than it has in 

 the United Kingdom, during the period 1895 to 1915, the 

 German Empire would have been at the end of its food 

 resources long before the end of the second year of the 

 war," adding that the war was, as a matter of fact, " being 

 fought just as much on an agricultural as on a military 

 organisation of the Nation." The statement is probably 

 correct, and Lord Selborne was right in laying particular 

 stress upon the word " Organisation." 



Very opportunely then has the Board of Agriculture — 

 still acting under Lord Selborne's judicious and timely 

 instructions, pubHshed a masterly memorandum, written 

 by Mr. T. H. Middleton, on the condition of Agriculture 

 in the country of our great enemy rival, Germany, with 

 whose position in the matter we are naturally led to com- 

 pare our own. Mr. Middleton's inquiry has revealed some 

 highly disconcerting facts. On every point, except one, 

 in the comparison of average yields of crops per acre, do 

 we come out below the German figure. The main result 

 is perhaps best summed up in the statement, made upon 

 the ground of official statistics, that Germany manages to 

 feed from seventy to seventy-five persons per 100 acres 

 of cultivated land, as contrasted with our only forty-five 

 to fifty, notwithstanding the fact that the German cultivated 

 area includes wide sweeps — about two-fifths of the whole 

 area — of soil of unquestionable inferior quality — sand of 

 the diluvium, descending from the point of still fair pro- 

 ductiveness to that of almost absolute barrenness— even 

 below that of the Belgian " Campine," which Lavelege 

 styled " the VN^orst in Europe "—which, with an allusion to 

 the antiquated custom, still adhered to in many a German 

 Government office, of using sand in the place of blotting 

 paper for absorbing ink, passes popularly by the name of 



