M.— AGRICULTURE. 247 



in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Oxford, Cambridge, and 

 our other universities, as well as the agricultural colleges, are to-day 

 training large numbers of prospective landowners in the science and 

 practice of agriculturei — a course which a generation ago would have 

 been deemed vulgarly utilitarian, and inconsistent with the traditions 

 of a liberal education — and many hundreds are flocking to avail them- 

 selves of the opportunities thus afforded. Some, too, of our public 

 schools, and notably Eepton, Oundle, and Christ's Hospital, alive to 

 the new demand, are including in their curriculum the study of agricul- 

 ture, while others, averse from early specialisation, are strengthening 

 their science teaching as a prelude to more specialised instruction else- 

 where. But such training, wherever acquired, to be really effective 

 must not be that of the mere well-informed onlooker and critic. 

 It must include personal acquaintance with the actual manual 

 processes of husbandry if the rural employer and organiser of 

 the future is to understand fully the daily tasks of the farm 

 worker, his difficulties, his mentality, and his potential output. 

 He should, if practicable, work as a labourer (as does many an enter- 

 prising young Danish landowner) for at least a year on a well-conducted 

 and well-organised arable farm, preferably before, and not after, he 

 studies the scientific or even the commercial side of the business. The 

 most efficient education is generally froin the concrete to the abstract, 

 rather than the reverse. The lack of commercial training has ruined 

 many a hard-working ' gentleman farmer. ' He should learn the 

 rudiments of commerce and not be ashamed Lo do his own marketing. 

 If possible, too, he should by means of travel learn something of 

 the methods of husbandry practised on the Continent as well as in 

 other parts of the United Kingdom, as did Archbishop Morton (the 

 pioneer of the drainage of the Fens), Hartlib, and Sir Eichard Weston 

 in Flanders, Jethro Tull both in Flanders and in France, Viscount 

 Townshend in Hanover and Holland, and Arthur Young throughout 

 France, Great Britain, and Ireland. He will ultimately embark upon 

 his life's work — the pleasantest and most engrossing of all pursuits — 

 with an equipment far exceeding that of Townshend or of Coke. They 

 were empiricists, groping by experiment and often disappointing ex- 

 perience towards the light, without the conscious aid of science. In 

 the landowner of to-day the association of practice with science, and the 

 capacity for leadership inherent in eveiy healthy Briton, should carry him 

 to spheres of successful economic achievement to which they could never 

 have aspired, and concurrently raise the reputation o^f British farming 

 once again to a pinnacle of undisputed superiority above all its rivals. 



A leading land agent, speaking recently at a large gathering of the 

 land agents' profession in London, significantly said: ' Our principals 

 are getting even more difficult to manage than their estates.' Surely 

 this intractability is a sign of grace, an evidence that the landowning 

 fraternity are at last awakening from the irresponsible torpor which 

 has for long benumbed their potential utility. 



Perhaps, however, the greatest stimulus to enterprise, born of 

 increased confidence on the part of landowners, will prove to be their 

 consciousness of the numerical reinforcement of the class to which they 



