100 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



cause of Agricultural Education, and in giving scope to it 

 have done unquestionable good. But many of them have 

 evinced little sympathy enough with the object of their 

 task. " Some of them," so Mr. Brooke Hunt, the Inspector 

 of our Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, deposed before 

 Lord Reay's Committee, " give little or nothing towards 

 Agricultural Education." And, put the action of the County 

 Councils at its best, there is this to be said against it, which 

 stands in the way of success, that, in the first place, there 

 is no uniformity about it, possibly no distinctly recognised 

 aim at all ; and, in the second, that the members of those 

 Councils have other things to think of as well, and other 

 interests to serve, to which often enough precedence is 

 allowed. It is humiliating to read — in the evidence given 

 before Lord Reay's Committee- — of a witness obtaining, by 

 hook and crook, a miserable grant of £30 for a journey to 

 Switzerland, to study there the important subject of dairy 

 organisation (which is, in Switzerland, carried to a high 

 point), when, as the same witness learnt on arriving at 

 Berne, the Government of the little Republic devotes 

 annually £4,000 to dairying research. 



Although our Treasury has been niggardly, the cause 

 for our doing things amiss, so it will be well to point out 

 and to bear in mind, does not lie with any lack of money, 

 in this country. " The total amount of money available for 

 Agricultural Education in England," so deposed Professor 

 J. R. Campbell before the Departmental Commission on 

 Agricultural Education sitting in 1907-8," is infinitely greater 

 than that available in Ireland (where the amount spent on 

 the subject per annum at that time amounted to about 

 £146,000), because the County Councils of England get very 

 large sums of money, which they may apply as they choose." 

 The fault committed is that " you can put no compulsion 

 upon them. They do what they like with the money, and the 

 central authority has no control over them at all." Ques- 

 tioned by Lord Barnard, sitting as chairman — who remarked 

 that he could hardly call the arrangement practised in 

 England " a system " ; he would call it " the want of a 

 system " — whether to make the arrangements in England 



