388 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



purely the result of high war prices. " The new race of 

 men," so says Mr. Prothero, " who were beginning to occupy 

 land, were better educated, commanded more capital, were 

 more open to new ideas and more enterprising than their 

 predecessors." They were " strongly marked by a liberality 

 of thinking," says Marshall. " Quite a different sort of 

 men," says the Oxfordshire Report, " quite new men, in 

 point of knowledge and ideas." Passing from the old men 

 to the new, " I seemed to have lost a century in time, or 

 to have moved a thousand miles in a day." They were 

 cultivated men, men of study, and " who had travelled 

 much and mixed constantly with one another." "They 

 made extensive tours for the sole purpose of examining 

 modes of culture, of purchasing or hiring the most improved 

 breeds of stock and seeing the operations of newly invented 

 and most useful implements " — men who " had mixed 

 with what is called the World . . . occupying the same 

 position in society as the clergy and the smaller squires." 

 They were, in fact, mutatis mutandis, according to the 

 time passed in the interval, the very class of men whom we 

 must now wish to see back upon the land, cultivating it — 

 men of education, of independent station, of ideas, and 

 men who have been attracted to the land by brighter pros- 

 pects. The bad times which followed, marked by a decidedly 

 reactionary regime, provoking disturbances which were 

 put down with a merciless hand, which, after the stress of 

 war, brought feudalism, accompanied by the new Corn Laws 

 — up to 1815 the Corn Laws had, as Mr. Prothero has testified, 

 " exercised little or no influence upon price " — altered 

 matters very much for the worse and ushered in " the 

 blackest period of English Farming," dispossessing once 

 more the rising race of cultivated, intelligent and enter- 

 prising owner-farmers, in order to make room for land- 

 hoarders and men who preferred " rabbits to forest," game 

 to crops, high hedges and ruinously cramping restraints 

 to free farming. There was no Co-operation then and no 

 ready Credit to protect them. As opposed to the land- 

 greedy rich man, the small owner found himself helpless. 

 The country did not gain by the change. The times of 



