Amateur Farming. 



i> 



conclusion. To go direct from the economic writings of 

 Young to those of Mill is like emerging from the obscurity 

 of the night into the clear, but not dazzling light of early 

 morning. 



There are some who have thought that he would have 

 done better had he left the abstract side of the agricultural 

 question to those more adapted by nature and education to 

 cool and philosophical reasoning. Thus Donaldson, one of his 

 biographers, complains that " though he collected a huge mass 

 of miscellaneous information which had no small effect on the 

 progress of agriculture, his ideas do not seem to have been 

 very practically clear on any point, his vision was too hastily 

 decisive, and the prospect dimmed by some crotchetty opinion."^ 

 Though to every word of this we subscribe, yet we cannot 

 ignore the fact that Young's various crude attempts at philo- 

 sophical reasoning were interspersed amidst a vast reservoir 

 of accurate technical information, and though they would 

 have been unreliable reading for the tyro, the veterans in 

 political economy have always known how to pick out the 

 silver from the dross. In fact, all our more modern economists 

 have gone to him for what practical information they required, 

 and, indeed, if only the mere secular reader of his works will 

 bear in mind that his too exaggerated bias in favour of agri- 

 culture was caused, not because he was born a landowner and 

 brought up a landholder, but because he was a physiocrat 

 and a philanthropist, he will be able to appreciate all that is 

 valuable in them while he is in a position to discount their 

 many errors. 



In another place, the biographer last alluded to remarks 

 that, " like to all ardent temperaments Young had hailed the 

 French Eevolution as the dawn of a bright prospect to the 

 human race, but being now placed " (by his appointment, 

 forsooth, as Secretary to the Board of Agriculture) " under the 

 shade of aristocracy, he rested quietly stib silejitio, and never 

 said a word more about revolutions, probably rightly thinking 

 his income was more certain than anything that might lapse 



' Agricultural Biography, sub voc. " Arthur Young." John Donald- 

 son, 1854. 



