RECLAMATION OF WASTE LAND. 413 



has passed into a proverb. You see the same thing in 

 Germany, wherever vines can be cultivated so as to ensure 

 a sufficient return, more particularly on the Rhine and the 

 Moselle. One of the most famous Moselle wines has been 

 given the name of " Treppchen " from the " steps " hewn 

 into the rocksides to enable the cultivator to reach the 

 httle plots carefully made cultivable, on which the grapes 

 ripen. In Germany you will find little land that is at all 

 suited for cultivation that is not actually put under the 

 plough or the spade — except in the desert sweeps of the 

 great sparsely peopled sandy plains, poorly provided with 

 roads. And even there cultivation is active on land which 

 it is doubtful whether we on our more happily situated 

 island, and with our very much more easy-going ways, would 

 consider to be worth cultivating. However, the careful 

 hauer labours from early to late to force his family's susten- 

 ance out of an unwilHng soil. So keen is he upon extracting 

 what he can from even unpromising sand that it has become 

 a saying that soil which produces heather will also produce 

 rye — which in Germany, as we know, forms the staple food 

 of the people. In France the thing is so much more striking 

 and more general, and more remarkable, also, because those 

 mountainside fields which delighted Arthur Young are only 

 rarely put to the lucrative use of growing vintage vines. 

 Whoever has seen those artificially created little plots on 

 the sides of the almost perpendicularly upstanding rocks 

 near Aniane, memorable as the abode of the great reformer 

 of monasteries, on the way to the venerable ruins of the 

 abbey of Saint Guillem, will not fail to give credit to French 

 husbandmen for making the very most of what cultivable 

 land Providence has placed within their reach. 



We, for our part, although in our island more people are 

 crowded together in smaller space, have been far more 

 indifferent to waste. We appear to Hke the " unprofitable 

 gayness " of waste land, we like sport, and we love natural 

 beauty. We separate our fields by hedges which cost 

 us very much more than we appear to be aware of in crop- 

 bearing power — because they are so picturesque. The 

 sight of a bare plain of fields, such as we observe in the best 



