50 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



relief. This is a sad and humiliating pass for British Agri- 

 culture to have come to. Britons used to take a pride in 

 doing things for themselves. It is doubly disappointing, 

 since Mr. Middleton's analysis of German farming has 

 made it clear beyond the possibility of a doubt, that German 

 agricultural improvement has been the result, not of State 

 aid, but of self-help — above all things of self-instruction 

 and co-operative organisation by farmers' own efforts. 



The creation of the Board of Agriculture has undoubtedly 

 not a little to answer for in connection with this relapse. 

 " Up to 1889 " — the year of its creation — so Mr. Prothero 

 points out, " all the improvements in English farming, 

 which at one time had gained for their country an undis- 

 puted supremacy in the art and practice of agriculture, 

 were effected by private capital, by individual enterprise, 

 by personal initiative." Landlords were the pioneers of 

 improvement. " The creation of the Board of Agriculture 

 altered all this. It constituted " an important reversal 

 of the old ideal ... a transference of responsibility from 

 private persons to the public department." People looked 

 to " the State," which, " for good or for evil, itself under- 

 takes much of the control and expenditure, which formerly 

 fell to the landowning class." 



Human nature being what it is, it is indeed scarcely 

 surprising that men of the very old school interested in 

 " Agriculture " — economic " Bourbons," who neither learn 

 nor forget — should have taken advantage of the opportunity 

 to trot out once more their long stabled stalking horse of 

 " Protection," calling out — as Sir James Caird, with a 

 good knowledge of Agriculture and its wants, put it, in 

 the 'fifties (when it had just been boxed up, as all the world 

 thought, for good) : " Give me back my crutch ! " But, 

 in truth, the proposal does little credit to human reasoning 

 or to an even only dim recollection of historical facts. For, 

 more particularly in its aspect of putting a duty upon wheat, 

 the old policy has an^/thing but a good record either in this 

 country or elsewhere. " It was the war, and not the Corn 

 Laws," so testifies Mr. Prothero, " which had given agri- 

 cultural production the monopoly of the home markets." 



