824 EEPORT— 1900. 



and still more in certain quarters abroad regular agricultural statistics are of quite 

 recent birth. 



It is difficult, perhaps, for us now to recall the comparatively recent origin of 

 comprehensive statistics of ao:riculture in Great Britain. Writers of note, 

 ecoimmist?, and philosophers had no doubt from early times ventured to make 

 estimates of more or less individual authority on the probable magnitude of our 

 cagricultural resources. Expert witnesses, with more or less opportunities of indi- 

 vidual observations, came before Parliamentary Committees with rough impressions 

 of the extent of our cultivated area and the distribution of the crops which it bore. 

 The labours of the old Board of Agriculture, which existed at the end of the last and 

 for a few years at the beginning of this century, amassed, no doubt, much valuable 

 though scattered local information and many details of farming practice, but they 

 completed no such exact survey as would have proved iuvaluable now to the 

 statisticians of 1900 respecting the use made of the soil of our country a hundred 

 years ago. The erroneous estimate of 47,000,000 acres of total area assigned to Eng- 

 land by the Chairman of that Board, when later data proved the measurements to 

 yield 10,000,000 acres less, is a warning of the care which is needed in the use of 

 such figures as were available in those distant days 



After efforts more or less spasmodic in 1831, again in 1845, and yet again in the 

 more complete work of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland in 1854- 

 7, encouraged by the verdict of the House of Lords' Committee of 1855, and fortified 

 by the repeated recommendations of International Statistical Congresses, the House 

 of Commons was, in 1864, persuaded by Sir James Caird to pass a resolution for the 

 establishment of annual agricultural returns. These were first collected in 1866, and 

 one year later thej' took the more complete form which gave us the continuous 

 records Great Britain now possesses for tracing the development or retrogression of 

 our country in agricultural conditions throughout the last third of the nineteenth 

 century. The data thus obtained must, of course, be read with full allowance for 

 some minute but inevitable variations of definition due to the gradual improvement 

 and growing completeness of the returns themselves, first under the Board of Trade, 

 then under the care of the Privy Council, and now under the Board of Agriculture. 



Agricultural statistics, whether in this or other countries, are assuredly not 

 exempt from the need of careful and intelligent handling and of caution in 

 drawing comparisons. The leading features to which any agricultural enquiry is 

 directed are naturally the extent and characteristic modes of the occupation of 

 the surface, the number of persons engaged and the size of their holdings, the 

 area and yield of the distinctive crops, and the numbers and classes of live stock. 

 Some of these points can, and others with advantage cannot, be made the subject 

 of direct annual enquiry and compilation. But in all cases questions as to precision 

 of definition arise when the careful investigator looks below the surface to see what 

 the figures really mean. 



The total measured areas of the countries we desire to contrast may, it is true, 

 be fairly accurately given, though even here there is room for error, in regard to 

 the practice of including or excluding areas covered by inland and tidal waters, 

 lakes, and rivers. When the next step is taken, and it is desired to contrast the 

 respective areas actually made use of for productive purposes, difSculties of com- 

 parison at once present themselves. The phrase ' cultivated ' area in our country 

 is one to which, at least in unofficial if not in Government publications, two 

 distiuct meanings are often attached. The term is sometimes used as if in some 

 sense synonymous with the arable surface, whereas in the other, and with us by 

 long tradition the ofiicial sense, the term covers all land, other than woodlands 

 or rough wastes and mountain grazings, utilised for agriculture, whether under the 

 category of permanent grass or under yearly varying crops. 



Nor is uniformity of practice much greater as regards the methods of returning 

 the actual agricultural population. The number of persons actually employed, 

 male and femHle, may as a rule be distinguished, but all countries are not agreed 

 as to what employment means. The practice as to who are and who are not 

 to be regarded as dependents, or as occasional and casual workers, may vary 

 greatly. In all countries, and perhaps rather more abroad than here, there are 



