760 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION M. 



Section M.— AGRICULTURE. 

 Peesident of the Section: R. H. Rew, C.B. 



WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



Farming and Food Supplies in Time of War. 



AfiRicuLTURE is the antithesis of warfare ; farming is pre-eminently a peaceful 

 avocation, and farmers are essentially men of peace. The husbandman is not 

 easily disturbed by war's alarms, and his intimate association with the placid 

 and inevitable processes of Nature engenders a calmness of spirit which is 

 unshaken by catastrophe. Many stories illustrative of this attitude of mind 

 come to us from the battlefields. The complete detachment of the fighting 

 men from the rest of the community which was usual up to quite recent times 

 is impossible in these days when in almost every country the anny is not a 

 class but the nation. It is inconceivable now that a war could rage of which 

 it could be said, as has been said of our Civil War : ' Excepting those who 

 were directly engaged in the struggle, men seemed to follow their ordinary 

 business and their accustomed pursuits. The story that a crowd of country 

 gentlemen followed the hounds across ]Marston Moor, between the two armies 

 drawn up in hostile array, may not be true; but it illustrates the temper of a 

 large proportion of the inhabitants.' ' But, while farmers and peasants within 

 the range of the guns cannot now ignore the fighting, they have repeatedly 

 demonstrated their invincible determination that the madness of mankind shall 

 not interrupt the calm sanity of the ordered cultivation of the soil. Of a 

 district in the Argonne, a correspondent, writing in April last, said : ' The 

 spring seed has already been sown or is being sown, sometimes indifferently, 

 under shell-fire, right up to the edge of the trenches.'^ A story was told of a 

 farmer in Flanders looking over the parapet of a trench and demanding of an 

 indinnant British officer whether any of his men had stolen his pia;. On 

 receiving a suitable reply, he observed that he had already asked the French, 

 who also denied all knowledge of the missing animal, so that he supposed it 

 must be those condemned Germans, whom he forthwith proceeded to interview. 

 Such a sublime sense of values, such absorption in the things that matter, such 

 contempt for the senseless proceedings of warfare, are only possible to the 

 agriculturist. The quarrels of mankind are transient, the processes of Nature 

 are eternal. One thinks of Matthew Arnold's lines : 



The East bowed low before the blast 



In patient deep disdain ; 

 She let the legions thunder past, 

 And plunged in thought again. 



But, while the farmer is by instinct a pacifist, he is also, in a cause which 

 rouses him, a doughty fighter. In that same Civil War to which so many were 

 indifferent, the farmers of East Anglia, under Cromwell, changed the course of 

 English history ; and the thoroughness with which they turned their plough- 



* Prothero, English Farmivg. Past and Present, p. 104. 

 ' WestminsUr Gazette, April 30, 1915, 



