208 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
ments, synchronous with each successful attempt to improve the material 
and technical equipment of the farmer, can be progressively correlated 
with recovery from the two last periods of depression, and obviously 
indicate a growing sense of responsibility, not perhaps invariably altruistic 
in character, towards an undertaking which had been for too long the 
Nation’s creditor. 
The first of what may be termed the two modern agricultural (and 
general) depressions that followed upon a generation-long period of 
unexpected prosperity, due to monetary causes which more than countered 
the incidence of Free Trade and its accompanying policy of laissez faire, 
I need not describe to this audience, for the effects produced in the eighties 
and nineties, especially upon the arable districts, are familiar to all and 
remembered by many. ‘The predominant cause was a world disparity 
between the demand for, and the supply of, gold which had brought 
about an average fall in commodity prices of 40 per cent.; subsidiary 
causes were the rapid growth of overseas competition and a series of 
climatic vicissitudes. On that occasion, despite the recommendations of 
numerous witnesses before the Royal Commission of 1894, which ranged 
from suggestions for the adoption of bimetallism to the re-introduction 
of import duties, it is noteworthy that remedial measures were practically 
confined to reliefs from taxation. ‘The rates on agricultural land, repre- 
senting at that time only some 2s. to 2s. 6d. per acre, or less than 2 per cent. 
of outgoings, were halved by the Agricultural Rates Act of 1896 ; payment 
of tithe was legally shifted from tenant to landlord, and the maximum 
incidence of Land Tax was reduced from 4s. to 1s. in the pound. The 
total cost of the first and last of these measures was less than one and a 
half million pounds per annum, for the Treasury had agreed to meet 
only the then existing half share of the produce of rates on farmed land 
(£1,320,000) so that thereafter the taxpayer could with equanimity view 
the rising poundage—not so other contributors. The Nation, as repre- 
sented by its publicly uttered or published opinion, and the administration 
were content to leave the trinity of British agriculturists to find its own 
solution. True, the housing, education, and health of rural workers were 
now the subject of State intervention, but these were matters of general 
application and represented no special solicitude towards agriculture. 
Hours and conditions of labour remained, in this industry, unregulated. 
The farm was not yet a factory ; still less was it a controlled unit of pro- 
duction. It is perhaps a legitimate claim to make that the initiation, in 
1866, of seemingly so unimportant a matter as the collection of agricultural 
statistics formed the real foundation-stone of that structure—a Ministry— 
which was progressively to foster, and to direct, the farmer. Certainly, 
for the first time, there was thereafter available basic information relating 
to the then position and the future potentialities of British agriculture. 
Although no farmer of the nineties would have dreamed of giving vent to 
the apocryphal cry of his grandfather ‘ What we want is another war,’ 
yet, had he. but known it, nothing but such a catastrophe would have 
moved any administration to succour his industry. Actual hostilities, 
with their terrible aftermath of general unemployment, overtaxation, debt, 
