M.— AGRICULTURE. 241 



lacking individual initiative and enterprise encourages, and indeed 

 compels, Governmental guidance, interference, and control. In France, 

 for mstance (a nation of peasant proprietors), the State to a gi^eat extent 

 takes the place and performs the economic functions of the large land- 

 owner. But the State can take no risks in developing a commercial 

 enterprise even when science points the way. It may encourage and 

 subsidise scientific investigation, but it cannot compel its application to 

 agncultural practice. In England it was private enterprise which re- 

 clamied wastes, drained marshes, consolidated uneoonomic holdings, 

 enclosed commons, and raised at one period the quality of British live- 

 stock, and at another the standard of British cultivation, to a position 

 of unchallenged supremacy throughout the world. 



The original ' Board of Aginculture, ' which was founded in 1793 

 on the initiative and inspiration of Arthur Young, was for a time the 

 chief agency by which a policy, dictated originally by the enUghtened 

 self-interest of the larger landowners and fostered by the demands of a 

 growing manufacturing population, was extended to the public advan- 

 tage throughout the kingdom. It expired twenty-nine years later, 

 during a period of acute agricultural distress, because it had exhausted 

 Its usefulness, and was found to be less efficacious in promoting 

 agncultural development than individual enterprise backed by the 

 employment of individual capital. The Royal Agricultural Society of 

 England, founded in 1838, became its legitimate and acknowledged 

 substitute, and, in fact, marked the revival of rural prosperity which 

 synchronised with the acceptance for a time by landlords of the duties 

 of their position. In every civilised country the necessity for State 

 guidance and State control is in direct ratio with the prevalence of 

 small landowners. This control, while necessitated in France by a 

 peasant proprietary, has there been kept within bounds by the powerful 

 and widely diffused political strength of the agricultural industry. In 

 England, in the absence of such strength, Government control as it 

 extends is bound to be subordinated to urban interests and urban, and 

 often ignorant, prejudices. In a country where the agi'icultural popula- 

 tion are in a small and diminishing minority Government leadership and 

 landowner leadership are mutually incompatible and mutually destruc- 

 tive. The abandonment of the latter by a failm-e to found power upon 

 the informed exercise of duty must ultimately lead to Land Nationalisa- 

 tion. There is no small danger to an industry involved in its exclusive 

 possession of a separate State Department necessarily swayed by in- 

 constant and incalculable political currents. If some other Department 

 of the State were to take over the administration of animal diseases 

 and of milk control, and assuming that considerations of national 

 economy were to result in the entire abolition of the Ministry of Agricul- 

 ture, or at least in the limitation of its activities to the organisation of 

 agricultural research, and if simultaneously landowners were to assume 

 enlightened leadership of the industry and the Eoyal Agricultural Society 

 were to carry out to the full the original intentions of its founders, 

 British agriculture would probably acquire more permanent stability 

 and the nation consequentially enhanced security. Failing the simul- 

 taneous and improbable fulfilment of all these conditions, the growing 



