AGRICULTURE. 



otherwise but that fetid stenches, and encum- 

 bering filth must tend to breed disease, he 

 would not allow so baleful a neglect to con- 

 tinue. It is futile to urge that where stock is 

 large, the attendance to such treatment is im- 

 possible ; for if it is beneficial it will pay to 

 adopt it ; and no one should engage in a larger 

 concern than he can manage in the most bene- 

 ficial mode. 



Germany. The inhabitants of the different 

 districts of this extensive empire pay particu- 

 lar attention to the cultivation of timber trees. 

 The number of German books on the subject 

 is excessive. 



It is a subject which has of late years been 

 gaining much attention also in England, and 

 planting will probably be still further extended 

 over many of the poorer soils that at present 

 will not pay whilst producing corn. 



The careless and ignorant manner in which 

 the labourer is allowed to mutilate timber trees 

 that grow upon most farms, cannot be too se- 

 verely deprecated. To train tiers correctly, 

 requires as much judgment as any operation 

 in v.-hich tin :cerned. 



Not an unnecessary wound .should he inflicted 

 upon them; for the process >f healu 

 wound not only deducts so much from the 

 growth of the tree, but IS usually th 

 ducer of decay. Yet t: with no other 



instrument than his bill, is generally allowed 

 an unguideduse of so unfit and mutilating a 

 tool. 



Lombardy. In this, and most of the other 

 Italian states, all rivers, and in some, even all 

 springs, are considered to be the property of 

 the government, for they are the source of 

 a considerable revenue. Any one desiring a 

 canal from a river has to pay lor it to the 

 government ; and he may cut it through an- 

 other {> and without the latter having 

 the power to prevent it, upon paying the value 

 of the land. Such canals are 1 as im- 

 proving the value of an estate, for they irrigate 

 not only their grass lands, but their corn, vines, 

 and other crops, numerous little channels 



rut for the purpose down the 

 The water from a river is purchased at a certain 

 price for so many hours' or days' run in the 

 year, through a sluice of a stated dimension. 

 Arthur Young mentions that the fee-simple of 

 an hour's run per week through a particular 

 sized sluice at Turin, sold in 1788, for 1500 

 livres. Watered lands usually let for one 

 third more than lands that are unwatered. 



We have already noticed, and shall again 

 have to recur to the subject of irrigation; but 

 we could not but notice the above national evi- 

 dence in favour of what we know to be one of 

 the most beneficial practices neglected by our 

 agriculturists. 



Tuteanv, Sismondi informs us that it is the 

 practice in this country, where he was himself 

 for five years a cultivator, to trench one-third 

 of the farm every year with the spade, bring- 

 ing the lower soil to the top. This mode of 

 culture bringing a new soil for the promotion 

 of vegetation, for it has been in a manner 

 lying two years fallow, is sanctioned by reason 

 as well as confirmed by practice. We are not 

 the advocates of a general system of spade 

 7 



AGRICULTURE. 



husbandry. There are objections to it that at 

 present are insuperable. But we do recom- 

 mend, and that from our own experience, its 

 partial adoption. There is no parish in Eng- 

 land in which many of the labourers are not 

 out of employ during a considerable portion of 

 the year. Perhaps the average of the poor's 

 rates were 10$. in the pound upon the farmers 

 rental; and this might have been reduced 

 more than one half, if every farmer had em- 

 ployed one man in spade husbandry for every 

 thirty acres he cultivated. Thus he would 

 have had some return for the money he ex- 

 pended; and the saving: of horse labour, and 

 the benefit of the extra cultivation, would have 

 turned tne balance in his favour, and he would 

 thus have got rid, in a great degree, of the 

 worst of all outlays an outlay without a pos- 

 sibility of a return. 



I have searched various statements of the 

 agriculture of the other European countries ; 

 but though I am gratified by the conviction 

 that they are all more or less improving, yet 

 in almost all their practices, except the culture 

 of the vine, they are very far behind England. 

 For that reason I leave them unnoticed, be- 

 then is no instruction to be extracted 

 from a detail of deficiencies that have already 

 i-rcome. Upon a revision of the whole, 

 I may remark that agriculture, in common 

 with all other kinds of knowledge, is always 

 flourishing, in proportion to the freedom of the 

 Spain, subjugated by its despotic 

 monarchy and priesthood, has an agriculture 

 imperfect and degraded beyond that of any 

 other European nation. Flanders has always 

 had a liberal government, and its agriculture 

 improved before our own, and is its equal 

 now. 



By freedom, I mean security of property and 

 person, unrestricted discussion of every virtu- 

 ous opinion, and an untainted distribution of 

 . With us, the era that introduced such 

 tn into England was that of the Reform- 

 ation, confirmed and strengthened by the ex- 

 clusion of the Stuarts in 1688. 



The introduction of the scholastic philoso- 

 phy, which revived that activity of mind 

 which the Grecian vanity had so much abused, 

 and the Romans, by their gross habits, had so 

 g paralysed ; the mathematical sciences 

 ' which the Grecians had imported from Alex- 

 andria and had forgotten; that natural and 

 experimental knowledge which neither the 

 Grecians nor Romans had ever much or per- 

 manently pursued ; the reformation of religion, 

 which removed from the mind that incubus 

 that forbad man to trust to his own reason, but 

 made it the bond-slave of interested ignorance ; 

 the invention of printing, which became the 

 mighty engine of diffusing accumulated know- 

 ledge ; were all events that preceded the seven- 

 teenth century, and rendered it an era splendid 

 by the general improvement which it afforded 

 in all the arts and sciences. These have justly 

 been represented as forming a circle, for they 

 are so united, so blended together, and so co- 

 assistant, that one cannot be improved without 

 the benefit being shared in some way by the 

 others. 



Agriculture participated in the general pro- 

 E 49 



