Septembee 2, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



315 



ment of 10 tons a day is not an unusual record at 

 a single railway station. 



Celery and carrots are also being grown in 

 Lincolnshire to an extent never before thought of. 

 Tlie former yields $150 to $300 to the acre, while 

 small grain yields only $40 to $50. But unfortu- 

 nately, only a certain character of soil is favorable 

 to celery culture, or the temptation would be to 

 turn Lincolnshire into one vast celery bed. Much 

 attention is also' given to carrots in the attempt 

 to retrieve losses due to the flood of imports. An 

 acre will produce from 15 to 25 tons, at $10 a ton. 

 The process of seeding is novel. The farmer mixes 

 sand with his carrot seed, to prevent its being too 

 thickly sown and thus being in large part wasted. 

 A field, then, somewhat resembles a desert, across 

 which the wind would whirl clouds of sand did 

 not the farnier slightly ridge and then roll the 

 field, checking the wind's effect. 



Whether the experiment of substituting straw- 

 berries, celery and carrots for small grain, and in 

 some cases for dairy products, will sensibly relieve 

 the distress in Lincolnshire is a question which 

 may not be answered for several years. 



These developments raise the question 

 whether agriculture in the eastern portion 

 of the United States could not proiit hy 

 Lincohishire's experience. New England and 

 the west are related much as Lincolnshire is 

 to foreign competition. Specialization in 

 non-competitive products has, with the prog- 

 ress of trucking in the south and of dairying 

 in the west, possibly narrower limits than 

 formerly. ISTevertheless, the trucking seasons 

 are not simultaneous, comparing the north 

 with the south. Likewise there are lines of 

 production in which the east may successfully 

 compete with the west. Here is a line of in- 

 quiry on the subject of sectional farm policy 

 in which much might be learned by collating 

 the experience of other countries and studying 

 in detail the local conditions, with a view to 

 defining what might be called non-competitive 

 spheres of production. Have the state and 

 federal departments of agriculture given ade- 

 quate attention to this phase of the subject? 



THE AGRICULTURAL POLICY OF GERMANY. 



The Contemporary Review has an exposition 

 of the present trend of Germany's economic 

 discussion in relation to agriculture, the his- 

 tory of which discussion the author, Edward 



Bernstein, traces from List's time (1789-1846) 

 down to the present.* List was a German- 

 American, it is well to recall, who was asso- 

 ciated with the beginnings of the anthracite 

 coal industry, afterwards was vice-consul of 

 the United States in Germany and earlier 

 (1817-1819) professor of political economy in 

 Tiibingen University. He died by his own 

 hand in 1846. His great work, ' The National 

 System of Political Economy,' was born, so to 

 speak, out of his American experience, and 

 was intended to put into scientific outline the 

 policy which should guide the economic de- 

 velopment of this country and Germany in 

 their relations to Great Britain, then nearing 

 the zenith of her industrial ascendency. 



The commercial policy of the United States 

 is now at the turning of the ways, and recur- 

 rence to List's famous theory of educational 

 duties, i. e., that protective duties must be 

 confined to educating the manufacturing 

 classes of the country up to the standard of 

 their advanced competitors, is eminently 

 timely. For Germany, List advocated an 

 agricuUur-manufactur-Staat, an economic sys- 

 tem best represented by the home market idea. 

 In List's time this meant duties on manu- 

 factured imports ; now it means duties on agri- 

 cultural products. Germany is becoming 

 more and more a manufacturing- country — ein 

 export Industrie Staat. The protection of agri- 

 culture, it is held by such professors as Wag- 

 ner and Oldenburg, is necessary for broaden- 

 ing and deepening the domestic basis of the 

 industrial structure, which would otherwise be 

 dependent on the exigencies of the foreign 

 market, with great danger to the state, espe- 

 cially in time of war. 



The real motive for this policy in the eco- 

 nomic thought of Germany lies deeper than 

 the question of markets. The secret is socio- 

 logical, and has its root in the -fear that, with 

 the urban growth of population, the decreased 

 income value of landed estates and of agri- 

 culture generally, the landed nobility and with 

 them the rural voter, must disappear from the 

 social constitution of national society, leaving 

 the control of the machinery of the state and 



* ' German Professors and Protectionism,' Con- 

 temporary Review, July 1, 1904. 



