248 RURAL ECONOMY OF ENGLAND. 



to 80s. and upwards, and fall to 15s. in the south. In 

 the north the farms upon the whole are small, say from 

 fifty to two hundred and fifty acres ; but in the south 

 they are immense some of two thousand and three 

 thousand acres, but mostly about one thousand. The 

 small farmers in the north are, generally speaking, men 

 of no capital, cultivating the land with their own hands, 

 with the aid of their families. In the south they are, for 

 the most part, wealthy men of enterprise ; and yet the 

 crisis did not affect the prosperity of the north, while the 

 southern part of the county was one of the districts where 

 it was most felt. 



The reason of this is, that cereals were too extensively 

 cultivated there. Salisbury Plain presents to the eye the 

 appearance of a deserted country, where a few farms, at 

 great distances from each other, are hid from view in 

 hollows, and where fields of corn, without a tree or fence, 

 extend as far as the eye can reach. These immense tracts 

 were formerly used only for sheep-pastures, but the high 

 price of corn caused them gradually to be converted into 

 arable land ; and this transformation, although profitable 

 at first, was not in every case judicious. Ricardo had 

 them in view, when he says that it is the good land that 

 is first cultivated for corn, then the middling, and finally 

 the bad, and that, the demand increasing always with the 

 population, it is the most expensively raised article which 

 regulates the price of the market. This axiom, however 

 true at the time, and in the country where it was pro- 

 pounded, has since been disproved in more than one in- 

 stance. England is about to show the reverse by aban- 

 doning the cultivation of cereals upon bad and middling 

 land successively, and this south Wiltshire can vouch for. 

 To produce at the dearest rate, even when an accidental 

 state of the market admits of its paying, is a wrong 



