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M.—AGRICULTURE 207 
informed that it had been originally adopted in the same county exactly 
a century earlier. 
When summarising the results of the policy followed during the post- 
Napoleonic war era, it is significant to observe that its cost to the 
Exchequer was negligible, for, rocklike, it rested on the axioms that con- 
sumers should pay to the utmost (in order that tenants and landlords might 
be re-established in secure positions) and that workers must, for the sins 
and omissions of statesmen, unavoidably suffer in full the blasts of an 
economic hurricane. A hundred years ago there emerged no measures 
aiming at the rehabilitation of agriculture that could incommode the tax- 
payer, and, if we exclude the reliefs granted to the rural poor, none 
affected the ratepayer. Nor, in consequence, did any real change in the 
practical side of the industry reveal itself. War-expanded cereal acreages 
were, for the time being, required to meet the Malthus-defying trend of 
population; and here, in this county, on Lord Leicester’s and other 
reclaimed marshes, the bullock, where once the bittern had boomed, 
could, it was claimed, still batten, but not necessarily with profit to its 
owner. The inevitable emergence of Free Trade was, as a result of the 
hostility engendered by the Act of 1815 and its successors of the twenties, 
possibly antedated by a decade. 
Such, from the landowner’s and the farmer’s standpoints, were then 
the results of two decades of European war. The worker, thanks to a 
compulsory and biased system of enclosure and also to the loss of extraneous 
sources of family income—attributable to what is popularly known as the 
Industrial Revolution—found his resources permanently crippled and his, 
often hereditary, association with the land dissolved. ‘The Nation, whilst 
recognising no obligation as resting upon itself, could, during the next 
generation, watch with equanimity the astonishing march of bricks and 
mortar across the northern face of England’s green and pleasant land—and 
also, incidentally, outwards from London across its brown and fertile 
arable fields. By an almost unbelievable piece of parsimony the only 
official connection between the State and agriculture had been severed 
when the old Board of Agriculture, formed under stress of war and in 
recognition of Arthur Young’s unique services, failed by little more than 
two years to survive his retirement in 1820. Its resurrection, oddly 
enough, occurred during a time of high farming, and when depression 
was a thing of the past, with the establishment, in 1865, of a branch of the 
Privy Council charged with the control of animal diseases. 
The vast changes in a century revealed by such a synthesis must, if 
the causes are sought, be placed in two categories. On the one hand, 
those improvements in the relationship of master and man, that strengthen- 
ing of the position of the tenant at the expense of the landlord, the great 
amelioration in the social life of all those who labour on the land—these 
are attributable to a steady and continuous readjustment of standards, 
without regard to any fluctuations in the state of agriculture itself, which 
have equally affected other industries and the rest of the community, and 
have not resulted from any ad hoc expenditure upon the countryside. 
On the other hand, all changes improving the financial stability of the 
industry, reliefs of a fiscal character, all complementary economic adjust- 
