146 GENERAL IMPRESSIONS IN 1910 



areas, yet every few miles of our journey we found 

 ourselves in a totally different country from a farming 

 point of view. This indicates that the British farmer 

 has learnt, partly by old tradition, partly by his personal 

 skill, to adapt his methods very nicely to his particular 

 environment, whether of soil, or of markets, or of climate. 

 One sometimes felt inclined to disagree with the local 

 practices, which a wider experience of other districts 

 might have taught the farmer to modify with advan- 

 tage ; but one cannot be too diffident in advancing 

 such opinions, so great is the value of tradition and 

 experience in the workaday matters of agriculture. 

 This diversity of British farming has been very im- 

 perfectly reported ; many of the systems in vogue have 

 not yet reached the text-books, and are little known 

 outside their own districts, though they deserve serious 

 economic study, and will doubtless receive it as the 

 agricultural colleges grow in strength and the members 

 of their staff obtain more leisure for personal investiga- 

 tion. Indeed, such examination of local systems might 

 easily lead to a most instructive method of teaching of 

 what we might call " Comparative Agriculture." 



But if the methods of British agriculture are very 

 diverse, they seemed uniformly to be meeting with a very 

 fair measure of success, for one could not but conclude 

 that the industry as a whole was in a prosperous condition 

 and had healthily and stably recovered from the great 

 depression that lay upon it as recently as fifteen years 

 earlier. Our views were doubtless coloured by the fact 

 that we almost inevitably saw one of the leading farmers 

 in each district we visited, and, again, did not meet with 

 the number of other men who from lack of business 

 aptitude or some initial handicap were still struggling 

 desperately to make both ends meet. Still, we con- 

 cluded that farming was in a good way and was 



