24)2 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



enterprise of landowners should, in tlie public interest, obviate the 

 necessity for ever-increasing Government intervention and control. 



The long-continued divorce until comparatively recent times of 

 science and agiiculture in Great Britain was somewhat remarkable, and 

 accounted to no small extent for the discontinuous progress and 

 prosperity of the latter. The landowner, who, with the dissolution of 

 the monasteries, alone governed the economic destinies of the country- 

 side, was seldom a farmer and never a scientist. His own education 

 fitted him for the profession of arms, court life, sport, politics, or 

 diplomacy. His personal association with industry or commerce would 

 have placed him outside the social pale. It was, it must be admitted, 

 the tenant farmer — and notably Robert Bakewell, of Dishley — who in 

 the Golden Age of agricultural progress was the pioneer of live-stock 

 improvement. But it was the landowner who was the pioneer of im- 

 provements in the cultivation and output of the soil. It was, however, 

 as educated thinkers, alive to the economic needs of their times, rather 

 than as agrarian experts, that men like John Evelyn and Sir Richard 

 Weston in the seventeenth century, and JethrO' TuU, Charles, second 

 Viscount To'Wnshend, Coke of Norfolk, and the fourth and fifth Dukes 

 of Bedford (the latter the founder of the Smithfield Club) in the eighteenth 

 century, advocated and carried through a veritable revolution in agi'icul- 

 tural practice. Jethro TuU, a briefless barrister, was the originator of 

 the horse-hoe, as well as of the drill for sowing wheat and oats. He 

 and Lord Townshend, the statesman, by popularising the cultivation 

 of turnips and of leguminous crops, led to the introduction of the four- 

 course rotation as a noirmal agricultural practice, and established a 

 definite link between pastoral farming (conducted mainly for the pro- 

 duction of wool) a*id arable husbandly, rendering possible not merely 

 the winter feeding and consequent preservation of live-stock, but also 

 the largely augmented production of bread, corn, meat, and milk. So, 

 too', Thomas Coke, the sportsman, society beau, and politician, by 

 adopting and extending the methods of his Norfolk neighbour, not 

 only multiplied exceedingly the agricultural wealth of a barren tract 

 of countiy, ' which was little better than a rabbit warren, ' and induced 

 his tenants at enhanced rents to copy his methods, but also by making 

 his annual 'sheep shearings ' a fashionable rendezvous stimulated many 

 other landowners to follow his example. The progressive and profitable 

 activities of these pioneers were further advertised and contrasted with 

 less enlightened methods both at home and abroad by the brilliant and 

 indefatigable Arthur Young, who ' was not so much instrumental in 

 conveying knowledge to the common farmer as in becoming the vehicle 

 by which the latter 's want of knowledge was made known to experts.' ^ 

 The same gospel was subsequently preached by Cobbett and Oaird. 



None of these great men, whatever may have been their superficial 

 acquaintance with political economy, could be described as scientists. 

 They knew nothing of chemistry, physics, or biology. They were, in 

 fact, mere empiricists. Strangely enough, concurrently with the rapid 

 advances in farming practice science was making giant strides in the 

 direction of assisting the agricultural industry without the knowledge 



•■^ Russell Garnier's History of the English Lanclod Interest, 1893. 



