The Progress of Scientific Agriculture. 445 



sisting of six beasts, and its numerous pairs of horses dragging 

 harrowing and rolHng ; while on the other side of the road 

 were standing upon each acre, some five or six quarters of 

 wheat or nine or ten of oats. He described the agriculture of 

 the Northerner " as an unnatural attempt to ape that of Nor- 

 folk and Suffolk, — a mere playing at farming^ 



Yet the North of England was, he maintained, by no means 

 a " beggarly agricultural district." It was not a country of 

 farmers^ but of graziers^ whose " soil of its own accord, as if, 

 resolved to vindicate the decrees of its Maker, sent up grass 

 under the miserable corn crops in order to punish them for 

 their intrusion." This grass, not mixed with weeds as in 

 the southern counties, was " standing upon the ground as 

 thick as the earth could bear it, fattening everything that ate 

 of it, and forbidding its perverse occupiers to tear it to pieces." 

 Unfortunately, he adds, the " paper-money " price of corn had 

 tempted many men to do this, and the turf of these fine 

 pastures once destroyed, could not be restored probably in a 

 whole century. As a further incentive to grazing, most of 

 these northern farms, he adds, contained a large area of drilled 

 turnips ; their herds of cattle were the most beautiful he had 

 ever seen ; their sheep the most handsome, and the demand 

 for milk and mutton by the great towns in their neighbour- 

 hood inexhaustible.^ 



Though greater facilities of locomotion in 1850 had con- 

 siderably altered circumstances in districts at all remote from 

 the metropolis, they had, if anything, increased Cobbett's 

 arguments in favour of livestock breeding. For fat cattle and 

 sheep deteriorate in value far more by being transmitted along 

 inferior roads than do other forms of agricultural produce. 

 Both rents and prices were in Young's time largely dependent 

 on distances from the centres of civilisation, a truth which he 

 illustrated by describing the principal highways north of 

 Newcastle-under-Lyme, as consisting of ruts four feet deep, 

 full of floating mud, and almost impassable even for the 

 ordinary traveller. Along such execrable routes, how was it 



* Cobbett's Tour in Scotland, pp. 1-25. 



