414 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICUUfURE. 



cultivated parts of Germany, with nothing between them 

 but at most ten inches of grass, not unnaturally palls upon 

 us. God forbid that we should get rid of more commons 

 than we have done already, or destroy the beauty of our 

 smiling English landscape ! But it is not commons only 

 that lie waste. And if we want to retain our commons and 

 gentlemen's parks and hedges and the like, we shall have to 

 bear in mind that the indulgence of our aesthetic tastes, to 

 the prejudice of cultivation, has to be paid for. And when 

 the time of pinch comes, the question arises : How much 

 can we afford to pay ? 



Quite apart from the plenteousness of bad farming that 

 our experts complain of, and the land which would well 

 repay tilling unwisely laid down to pasture, there is plenty 

 of land that we might with great advantage put to agricul- 

 tural uses — say those veritable nests or " pockets " of 

 fertihty studding our East coast, alike of Scotland and of 

 England, which would yield rich meadows and capital 

 arable land, capable of producing crops of great value. 

 We have learnt what drainage of land and warping means 

 on such soil from our early Dutch settlers. There are in 

 truth, for M^ork of this kind, no better teachers than the 

 denizens of the two sections of the Low Countries, whose 

 employment not only of their low-lying land, but also of 

 the dry sandy stretches inland, is something to wonder 

 at. They do not grudge either labour or study. And they 

 secure for that labour handsome rewards. We talk rather 

 disparagingly of the light Belgian " Campine," which 

 Laveleye branded as " the worst soil in Europe." In the 

 sandy marches of Brandenburg — which are nevertheless 

 to a considerable extent well cultivated — I have heard 

 farmers lamenting that their sand will not come up to the 

 quality of that despised " Campine " ! 



Why cannot we, in spite of the drawbacks already indi- 

 cated, under the influence of our rather notorious disposi- 

 tion — recently referred to by Sir J. Stirling Maxwell, quoting 

 from a Belgian economist — to measure all things by their 

 capacity only to " pay," husband our land in something 

 of the same way ? The war has come upon us and has 



