440 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 



auctioneers, agents, etc., even the smallest country 

 market supports), more enlightenment could get better 

 value at lower cost for both manures and feeding stuffs, 

 just as a sound system of bookkeeping would open the 

 farmer's eyes to wastages and mistakes of policy. But 

 the effect of each of these improvements is in itself 

 slight, sometimes in the order of five or ten per cent., 

 and the whole of them would not materially alter the 

 character of the industry. There is nothing revolu- 

 tionary in sight : America and the Colonies, so often 

 quoted as examples of modern farming, have nothing 

 to teach us, and the lesson of the highly-farmed 

 Continental countries Holland, Belgium, Denmark 

 is not the transplantation of this or that industry, but 

 that intelligence and foresight will be always finding 

 openings for profit in various directions. Fruit, 

 vegetables, hops, pedigree stock, the growing of seeds, 

 bulbs, poultry, and a score of other special businesses 

 can be made to pay handsomely, though many of them 

 have been unduly neglected in Great Britain ; but after 

 all they are and must remain the fringes of the great 

 industry, which is fundamentally concerned with corn 

 and meat. 



What the ordinary farmer needs above all things is 

 better education ; and by this we mean not so much 

 additional knowledge of a technical sort, but the more 

 flexible habit of mind that comes with reading, the 

 susceptibility to ideas that is acquired from acquaintance 

 with a different atmosphere than the one in which he 

 ordinarily lives. The British farmer will be brought 

 to co-operate with his neighbours not by the doubtful 

 bait (and doubtful it must be to each individual) of 

 better discounts through wholesale buying or higher 

 returns from pooling his produce with that of his 

 competitors, but by acquiring a mind open to the 



