32 THE POLICY OF THE PLOUGH 



look with amazed covetousness on the great tracts 

 of English land which are let for insignificant rents, 

 and where careful tillage would produce remunerative 

 crops. Well may they look ! In Holland men re- 

 move vast sand-dunes in order to create farms for 

 bulb growing. They reshape fields and restrict the 

 courses of waterways in order to gain " painful 

 inches " for fresh cultivation. If England were 

 HoUand, as Sir H. Rider Haggard has pointed out, 

 the Thames estuary would run in a confined channel, 

 and the flats and saltings on either side would be re- 

 claimed for the plough. 



The wastefulness of the English farmer in our back- 

 ward counties is a sort of indirect testimony to the 

 productiveness of the land. Only in a country where 

 crops are produced easily, and land is cheap, could 

 our casual methods bring a man a tolerable living. 

 Liquid manure is allowed to run to waste, though it is 

 not a difficult or expensive matter to collect it in a 

 tank. Hedges are allowed to grow till they keep in 

 habitual dampness a broad margin round cornfields. 

 A French visitor would notice that no English small 

 farmer has thought it worth while to grow fruit 

 in his hedges, though in France many of the small 

 cultivators make an appreciable profit every year 

 by this plan, which requires more forethought than 

 labour. 



Unhappily, English landowners, for aU their charac- 

 teristic generosity, do not set a good example to the 

 farmer. They have not as a class regarded land- 

 owning as a profession which requires serious training 

 and high technical knowledge. In days when it 



