The Making of the Land. 227 



seventy-eight during the ten years from 170-i to 180-i. In 

 several of his works ^ Young talks of the vast tracts of waste 

 lands as disgracing many counties in the kingdom, and calls 

 in the strongest terms on the agricultural interest to remove 

 this stigma, estimating that many millions of money might 

 be annually added to the national wealth were such useless 

 ground redeemed and cultivated, and begging the legislature 

 to offer a bounty for the encouragement of reclamation. 



Fully corroborative of this view are the Reports to the 

 Board some twenty years later, and from the statistics 

 afforded subsequently by its committee we learn that out of 

 twenty- two million acres of waste in Great Britain there 

 were nearly eight millions in England and Wales only. 

 Wherever extra fertilisers in addition to the manure pro- 

 duced on the holding were obtainable, farmers had set to work 

 to reclaim wastes with avidity, but seem to have counter- 

 acted much of the permanent good derived from the changed 

 economy by their greediness. The practice 'was to fence off 

 the various fields, lime heavily, and plough up the old turf. 

 During the first two or three seasons the productiveness of the 

 soil for all kinds of cereals exceeded the highest expectation, 

 and farmers went on growing white crop after white crop till 

 the land was on the verge of sterility. Thus Lawrence, one 

 of the earlier writers, in his New System of Agriculture (pub- 

 lished in 1726), holds out, as an inducement to the farmer to 

 enclose, the bait that he will be able to grow seven, eight, or 

 ten crops successively and successfully. Before, therefore, 

 stern experience put an end to this practice, there must have 

 been many instances where the examples of its disastrous 

 results had impeded the process of enclosing. 



Thus therefore, even at the end of the century, there were, 

 in such advanced farming districts as Middlesex, many thou- 

 sand acres of waste land within a few miles of the capital, of 

 little or no value to the individuals interested in them, an 

 absolute nuisance to the public, and yet capable of very great 



^ Compare Political Essays, sub voc. "Agriculture," 1789 ; Six Months' 

 Tour in t/ie North, vol. iii. p. 342 ; and Observations on the Present State 

 of Waste Lands of Great Britain, passim, 1773. 



