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Rural Economy at Oxford. 



[JUNE, 



THE STUDY OF RURAL ECONOMY 

 AT OXFORD. 



S. L. Bensusan. 



Some time in the days when the star of the first Napoleon was 

 in the ascendant, and nearly ten years before Great Britain, by 

 her victory in Trafalgar Bay, assumed the hegemony of the seas, 

 Professor Sibthorp founded in Oxford and endowed a Pro- 

 fessorship of Rural Economy. Through the century that 

 followed the study languished in the absence of urgent need, 

 but when Time gave birth to conditions that demanded change, 

 the means of bringing it about were to hand. The outstanding 

 question would appear to have been one of detail rather than 

 of principle, for when the authorities at Oxford decided to 

 interest themselves anew in agricultural work, they were faced 

 by several difficulties. 



In the first place, Cambridge had already taken up the purely 

 scientific side of agriculture and was engaged on successful 

 work of national importance. The study of agriculture on 

 modern lines was the keynote of the work at University Colleges 

 like Wye and Reading, and it might have seemed at first that, 

 without duplicating either the research of Cambridge or the 

 technology of the leading farm- schools, it was well-nigh im- 

 possible to find a field for service. Fortunately, Oxford sur- 

 veyed the outlook ''with a dilated eye." It was seen 

 that while much work of great importance was in progress 

 elsewhere for the benefit of men of science and those who 

 proposed to follow^ high farming, nothing was being done 

 deliberately, and in pursuit of a well-considered programme, 

 for those land-owners who have for centuries been the up- 

 holders not only of agriculture, but of a great rural tradition, 

 men whose sons, generation after generation, find their way 

 to the University. 



At a Conference held in 1916, and attended by Lord Selborne, 

 Lord Ernie, the Master of Balliol, Sir Daniel, Hall, and others, 

 a scheme was devised to give the future landlords of Britain a 

 training, practical and theoretical, that will do more than 

 merely fit them to take intelligent oversight of their tenants* 

 acts of husbandry. It will enable them, if they are prepared to 

 shoulder the heavy burden of their responsibilities, to turn their 

 home farm into a model farm for the district ; a holding on 



