118 RURAL ECONOMY OF ENGLAND. 



great extent in pasture, are subject to manifest drawbacks. 

 When cereals form a part of the cultivation, the distance 

 to be traversed by men and horses, even with the improved 

 means invented in the present day, becomes a serious loss 

 of time and power. It is a difficult matter for the farmer 

 to give his attention to different parts of the farm at 

 the same time. I have seen farms of this description be- 

 longing to noblemen home-farms, as they are called 

 and managed by stewards, which make a great appear- 

 ance, but where the waste is proportionately great. The 

 owners take a hereditary pride in these gigantic estab- 

 lishments, emblems of wealth and power ; but in most 

 cases they would be great gainers by letting them to 

 real farmers. 



If the necessity for employing every day a larger 

 capital in farming, in order to increase the production 

 required to meet the greater consumption, tends to dimi- 

 nish the number of small farms, it cannot fail to have a 

 like effect upon the largest sized. They talk now in 

 England of a working capital of 16 per acre, and it is 

 probably not too much for the new methods every day 

 suggested by the progress of agriculture. Now, if many 

 cultivators who farm their own land find it difficult to 

 command such a sum, it is no less rare, even in England, 

 to find those who enter into large farming operations 

 possessed of a capital of ten or fifteen thousand pounds. 

 It is probable, then, that the number of large and small 

 farms will become reduced at the same time, and that the 

 middle-sized (150 to 300 acres), now the most common, 

 will increase. This, in fact, appears to be the size best 

 suited for the kind of farming most generally adopted, 

 but that, properly speaking, is not large farming.* 



* In general, it will be found that the best and most liberal description of 

 farming in England is in occupations above three or four hundred acres. J. P. 



