728 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION M. 
Worlidge, for example, extols a country life and laments the fact that in his 
day the populace esteemed the country but a place for beasts, while the cities 
were for men; and Mackintosh of Borlum in upbraiding Scottish gentlemen for 
despising agriculture, is careful to indicate that the ‘pertest Speaker and 
Despiser of the Farmer’ he had met with was ‘an upstart estated Spark, Son of a 
Merchant, who Cato, Cicero, and Varro, all say, don’t put together Money so 
innocently, if the fairest dealing Merchant as the Countryman does.’ 
The change in the attitude of the educated classes to agriculture that took 
place within a century of the formation of the Royal Society is indicated in all 
the works published after 1750. Hirtzel, of Berne, e.g., in ‘The Rural Socrates’ 
(second edition, 1764) remarks: ‘It is no longer a controvertible point whether 
the science of Agriculture merits the distinguished attention of philosophical 
minds, and is the proper study of the most enlightened understanding ; since the 
proof is beyond contradiction, that a judicious rural economy is one of the chief 
supports of the prosperity of a State.’ In Henry Home’s dedication of ‘ The 
Gentleman Farmer’ to the President of the Royal Society (1776), we find this 
passage: ‘ Agriculture justly claims to be the chief of arts, it enjoys beside the 
signal pre-eminence of combining deep philosophy with useful practice’; and 
in the preface to the same work he says : ‘ Our gentlemen who live in the country 
have become active and industrious. They embellish their fields, improve their 
lands, and give bread to thousands.’ He contrasts these pursuits with those 
which formerly occupied the country gentleman : ‘ His train of ideas was confined 
to dogs, horses, hares, foxes; not a rational idea entered the train, not a spark of 
patriotism, nothing done for the public.’ 
How unlike the state of affairs described by Home were the conditions in a 
country resembling Britain, but in which the Spirit of the Improver had not been 
awakened, may be indicated by a quotation from a report on the farming of Hol- 
stein and Mecklenburg sent to Sir John Sinclair in 1794. The writer, M. Voght, 
states that the agriculture of North Germany was fifty years behind that of 
England, and explains its depressed state by saying: ‘Our noblemen are no 
farmers, and our farmers no gentlemen; our authors on agriculture possess no 
cultivated land, and those few who could give to the public the precious results of 
long experience and labour would starve their printer for want of readers.’ 
The landowner of North Germany, towards the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, was, indeed, in very much the same state as the landowner of Britain in the 
first quarter ; and it is when we compare the conditions described by Lisle, Mackin- 
tosh, Home, and Voght, that we begin to appreciate how much British farming 
owes to such associations as the Royal Society of England and the Honourable 
the Society of Improvers of Scotland. Had not the interest of landowners, and 
of the educated classes generally, been secured, there is no reason to suppose that 
the agriculture of Britain in 1794 would have been markedly in advance of 
that of Germany. 
I have already pointed out that both in England and Scotland the first 
impetus towards progress was economic in its character, and throughout the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries economic causes were constantly accelerat- 
ing the improvement of agriculture; but we must not make the mistake of sup- 
posing that a rise in prices necessarily brings about improvements in husbandry. 
A motive for improvement is provided and more labour may be drawn to agricul- 
ture, but it does not follow that there will be a real advance, and that there will 
be more food produced for the use of workers wm other industries. Without 
changes of system, 7.e., without improvements based on new discoveries, the 
effect of a rise of prices in a self-supporting country would merely be to alter 
the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture, and to form congested 
districts. This was the danger that threatened England early in the seventeenth 
and Scotland early in the eighteenth centuries; but fortunately for each country 
an intellectual revival followed close on the rise in prices, and attention was 
directed not only to the necessity for more food, but to the need for improve- 
ments which would afford a surplus for the support of the industrial classes. 
As Adam Dickson, writing at the time, and Thorold Rogers, reviewing 
economic history a century later, both point out, there is no question that the 
rise of the mercantile class led to a development of the commercial spirit among 
the landowners of the eighteenth century; but this is not the particular aspect 
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