aO THE POLICY OF THE PLOUGH 



abundant, beyond the imagination of our ancestors. 

 The land will give you back more than you put into it. 

 The falsest economy, for all but the knave who wants 

 to milk the land and pass it on to an unfortunate suc- 

 cessor in a few years, is to save money on the fertiHsers 

 which the land needs. In countries where intensive 

 farming is carried to its highest refinement the amount 

 spent on manures would turn the hair of an old- 

 fashioned English farmer grey. Yet Frenchmen, 

 Belgians, Danes, and Dutchmen are by disposition 

 thriftier than Englishmen; they do not part with 

 their money except for very good reasons. 



Although agricultural chemistry has made a wonder- 

 ful advance it has yet much to discover. The bacterio- 

 logy of the soil is still but a partly explored field. The 

 trouble in England is that farmers so far have not 

 made anything like a full use of science as applied to 

 their industry. The scientific farmer will have his soil 

 analysed, and will apply manures to make good the 

 lacking chemical ingredients very much as a sick man 

 has a prescription written for him by a doctor. But 

 this is not the way of the more backward farmers. 

 They are rather like the people who buy quack medicines 

 from hearsay or alluring advertisements. They find 

 that a neighbour has grown a fine crop on one of his 

 fields, and, discovering what fertiliser has been used, 

 they say that they will try " some of that." Just so 

 Mr. Smith says that he will try some of that concoction 

 that did a power of good to Mr. Jones — who suffered 

 from a wholly different complaint. What happens to 

 be right for one field may happen to be quite wrong, 

 even deleterious, in another. Yet on no better evidence 



