RISING RENTS 431 



In the first place we must recognize that the industry 

 is at present sound and prosperous. The great de- 

 pression touched its nadir about I 894 ; since that time 

 prices have been moving upwards and methods im- 

 proving. By degrees men learnt to cheapen production, 

 in some cases by improved machinery and by savings 

 in the actual husbandry, in others by a change of 

 objective, as when grass and milk replaced wheat and 

 beans. Rents were reduced, and before the century 

 ended it began to be evident that a new race of farmers 

 had grown up capable of making a living under the 

 existing conditions. From that time all the advances 

 in the price of corn and produce, of meat and milk and 

 wool, have been so much clear gain, but it was not until 

 about 1909 that there was any general recognition of 

 returning prosperity. About that time it became diffi- 

 cult to obtain a farm which had not some patent dis- 

 ability attached to it ; the advertisements of vacancies 

 that prior to Michaelmas used to fill pages of the 

 county newspapers in the nineties dwindled to a column 

 or more, and agents found themselves able to pick and 

 choose among would-be tenants. By 1912 the process 

 has gone still farther, rents have definitely risen with 

 the demand for land that cannot be satisfied, and in all 

 parts of the country men are obtaining very large 

 returns indeed on the capital they embarked in the 

 business. Of course every farmer has not been making 

 money; bad business habits and slipshod manage- 

 ment are far too common, and nothing is more surpris- 

 ing than the way bad farming exists alongside good. 

 We suppose that among grocers or gunmakers, solicitors 

 or saddlers, the same inequality of performance exists, 

 though the results are not set out so openly ; but still 

 other businesses can be standardized in a way that is 

 not possible to agriculture. But to a man who takes 



