a i 
M.—AGRICULTURE 209 
deflation, and psychological seguele, are clearly pre-requisites to any 
determined efforts to help our paramount industry. But, in the nineties, 
no foreigner threatened us, our secondary products were freely exchanged 
for an abundance of cheap food obtained from the ends of the earth, few 
statesmen worried over the loss of some millions of acres of arable land 
or the emigration of a few hundred thousand agricultural workers. Left 
to fight, by their own resources, an economic blizzard, the farmers spon- 
taneously developed such new forms of their industry as the long-distance 
milk trade and the production of fruit, vegetables and other foodstuffs of 
a luxury character which the growing wealth of the country could com- 
mand ; the meat trade, at first a standby when cereal prices sagged, was 
latterly well-nigh overwhelmed by overseas competition. Providentially, 
foresight and determination at home were supplemented abroad by 
application of the cyanide process to the extraction of gold and the proved 
ability of native races to endure life at a depth of more than a mile below 
the earth’s surface when winning this economic prophylactic. World- 
prices moved responsively upwards, carrying with them those of British 
agricultural products, and recovery was well on its way by 1908. 
At that time, too, the State tentatively assumed certain additional 
responsibilities ; by strengthening the powers of the Board of Agriculture ; 
by legislating—it must be admitted, abortively, in the first instance—for 
the provision of small-holdings ; and in certain other ways that would 
now be dismissed as parochial, but which were, at the time in question, 
the subject of astonished comment. Again, however, the cost was low— 
in keeping, indeed, with canons sacred to Gladstonian finance—and it 
might, for instance, be claimed that technical instruction to the farmer 
owes its inception to an unexpected windfall of ‘ whisky-money ’ rather 
than to any pre-determined Government policy of succour. So passed 
away, almost imperceptibly, the second great period of rural depression 
in these Islands, and it did so without affecting either the National outlook 
or the National purse. 
Any commentary upon the years 1914-19, with their story of rigid 
control applied to every feature of the industry, is fortunately not called 
for, nor am I here concerned with the gigantic cost of that control to the 
State, for my real objective is the third great period of agricultural de- 
pression—that which, starting in 1922, is, with most of its problems, still 
facing us. As I have already stressed its causatory and fundamental 
_ resemblance to that regnant from 1815 to 1830, I can pass on to analyse 
and to evaluate the remedial measures that have emerged, for, in contra- 
distinction to previous experience, we may now claim that peace hath 
her subsidies no less diverse than war. The thirteen years in question 
can be divided into two distinct periods—the first productive of direct 
subsidies, grants-in-aid and reliefs from taxation; the second marked by 
an entirely new development, i.e. the attempted control both of home 
production and of importation, accompanied by the re-establishment, 
after eighty-six years, of fiscal duties. 
I might perhaps at this stage be expected to assess the weight of this 
depression and to effect comparison between it and its two predecessors. 
