464 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



mined progress. It is the individual who by his insight 

 and discovery strikes out new promising paths. But it 

 is for the community to provide facihties for those for 

 whom the new paths are recommendable, to learn of and 

 follow them. There can be no cast-iron-ness about a living 

 interest. Not even the ultra-absolutist Prussian Govern- 

 ment, which has — so far as it could — laid Agricultural 

 Organisation, Agricultural Credit, Agricultural Education, 

 in fetters and put them in Government harness, has 

 attempted so manifestly imbecile a policy. Quite the 

 reverse. It has at all points encouraged individual action, 

 but laid itself out for watching and testing it, and made it 

 its avowed and loyally pursued aim to render its benefits 

 available for Agriculture at large. It has not, like our 

 Board of Agriculture, grasped perforce the helm of Agricul- 

 tural Co-operation, interfering with independent action, 

 but has secured the hold which it has eventually secured 

 in quite a different way. That accounts for the more 

 general improvement of German Agriculture, as compared 

 with our own, which is far more chequered with bright 

 light and dark shade — the predominating shade detrimen- 

 tally reducing the average. In this country, as Mr. Prothero 

 has put it, since i88g — that is, since the formation of the 

 Board of Agriculture — it is to that body that the lead in 

 agricultural matters has fallen — from the hands of those 

 enlightened landlords who previously, and up to that time 

 very satisfactorily, exercised it, but whose position has, by 

 modern legislation, by the changes effected in the relations 

 between the various classes connected with the land, and 

 by the dilution of the old landowning stock by the incursion 

 of much new blood, pulsating rather with the beating of 

 the property-loving and position-seeking heart than with 

 the agricultural, has suffered an eclipse, weakening its 

 power of leading. The Board of Agriculture was intended 

 to " lead," to gather the new rays of light breaking through 

 in various quarters, and shed their collected volume as an 

 illuminating and fructifying force, like the electric currents 

 which we now pour stimulatingly upon our growing crops* 

 upon Agriculture as a whole. To do it justice, it has 



