38o THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



that the country was made only for shooting and fox- 

 hunting^ — though they indulge in and enjoy their less pre- 

 tentious sport fully as much as do our gatherers of artifi- 

 cially swelled bags. Their country seat is their home and 

 their workshop, where they live and labour, and fully 

 fill their place in the local microcosm. When they make 

 their voice heard in public, it is as bona-fide agriculturists, 

 not as men of some other or of no calling, happening to 

 possess landed property. And their voice reaches the public 

 ear with all the greater force, since there are known to be 

 no necessarily conflicting interests among them as between 

 our landlords and tenants, whose bickerings have for a 

 long time weakened agricultural influence, since it was 

 held to be, not the agriculturist, but either the landlord 

 or else the tenant who was pleading pro domo suo, for his 

 own class only. 



No one in his senses assuredly would wish to reduce 

 land tenure and the occupation of Agriculture to one fixed 

 dead level. The present-day advocate of small holdings 

 does not plead for the abolition of large farms. The advo- 

 cate of ownership would not do away with tenant farming, 

 or the contender for medium-sized estates for the abolition 

 of all large properties. Every form of possession and of 

 occupation has its own peculiar uses in the public, as well 

 as in the private, interest, and should accordingly, within 

 its just limits, be retained. It would be short-sighted 

 policy indeed, for the sake of uniformity, to want to cut 

 up all large properties into small, or to abolish all large 

 farming concerns, up to the very most extensive, for the 

 sake of creating small holdings, for which there would on 

 such a scale be nothing like a sufficient personnel or demand. 

 Those large concerns, whether they be of a thousand acres 

 or of very much more, farmed, as they generally are, on 

 fully businesslike lines, and producing heavily, are a dis- 

 tinct asset to the Nation, the very large ones, highly farmed 

 as they are, constituting a valuable speciality of these 

 islands. But it would be just as short-sighted policy to 

 allow to those larger farming concerns a monopoly or even 

 a supremacy in the field to be occupied. It would be bad 



