476 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1084 



business and their accustomed pursuits. The story 

 that a crowd of country gentlemen followed the 

 hounds across Marston Moor, between the two 

 armies drawn up in hostile array, may not be true; 

 but it illustrates the temper of a large proportion 

 of the inhabitants.2 



But, while farmers and peasants within 

 the range of the guns can not now ignore 

 the fighting, they have repeatedly demon- 

 strated their invincible determination that 

 the madness of mankind shall not interrupt 

 the calm sanity of the ordered cultivation 

 of the soil. Of a district in the Argonne, a 

 correspondent, writing in April last, said: 



The spring seed has already been sown or 'S 

 being sown, sometimes indifferently, under shell- 

 fire, right up to the edge of the trenches.3 



A story was told of a farmer in Flanders 

 looking over the parapet of a trench and de- 

 manding of an indignant British officer 

 whether any of his men had stolen his pig. 

 On receiving a suitable reply, he observed 

 that he had already asked the French, who 

 also denied all knowledge of the missing 

 animal, so that he supposed it must be those 

 condemned Germans, whom he forthwith 

 proceeded to interview. Such a sublime 

 sense of values, such absorption in the 

 things that matter, such contempt for the 

 senseless proceedings of warfare, are only 

 possible to the agriculturist. The quarrels 

 of mankind are transient, the processes of 

 nature are eternal. One thinks of Matthew 

 Arnold's lines: 



The East bowed low before the blast 



In patient deep disdain; 

 She let the legions thunder past. 



And plunged in thought again. 



But, while the farmer is by instinct a 

 pacifist, he is also, in a cause which rouses 

 him, a doughty fighter. In that same civil 

 war to which so many were indifferent, the 

 farmers of East Anglia, under Cromwell, 



2 Prothero, ' ' English Farming, Past and Pres- 

 ent," p. 104. 



3 Westminster Gazette, April 30, 1915. 



changed the course of English history ; and 

 the thoroughness with which they turned 

 their ploughshares into swords is demon- 

 strated by the fact that when they took to 

 soldiering they put the nation for the first 

 and only time under what is now termed 

 militarism; that is, government controlled 

 by the army. In the last battle fought on 

 English soil the yeomen and peasants of 

 the West Country proved, amid the butch- 

 ery of Sedgemoor, that bucolic lethargy can 

 be roused to desperate courage. Indeed, 

 through all our island story, since the Eng- 

 lish yeomen first broke the power of medi- 

 eval chivalry and established the supremacy 

 of infantry in modern warfare, it has been 

 from the rural districts that the nation has 

 drawn its military strength. Even in the 

 present war, when the armies of the empire 

 have been drawn from all classes of the 

 community, the old county regiments and 

 the yeomanry squadrons with their roots 

 in the countryside have proved once more 

 that the peaceful rustic is as undismayed on 

 the field of battle as on the fields of peace. 



It is, however, in his pacific rather than 

 in his belligerent aspect that the British 

 farmer now claims our attention, and, be- 

 fore considering the position of farming in 

 the present war, we may briefly glance at 

 its position when a century ago the nation 

 was similarly engaged in a vital struggle. 



From February 1793 until 1815, with two 

 brief intervals, we were at war, and the con- 

 flict embraced not only practically all Eu- 

 rope but America as well. The latter half 

 of the eighteenth century had witnessed a 

 revolution of British agriculture. The 

 work of Jethro TuU, ' ' Turnip ' ' Townshend, 

 Robert Bakewell, and their disciples, had 

 established the principles of modern farm- 

 ing. Coke of Holkham had begun his mis- 

 sionary work; Arthur Young was preach- 

 ing the gospel of progress; and in 1803 

 Humphry Davy delivered his epoch-ma- 



