234 
Farming and Agricultural Training in 
power, and of steam-power over horse-power. I venture to 
quote the following concise statement of the problem from a 
speech made at the March meeting of the Farmers' Club by my 
friend Mr. D. Pidgeon : " In his admirable little book on Farm 
Labour, Mr. J. C. Morton has shown that we have in this 
country about 1^ million horses, of which 800,000 we employ 
in agriculture. Now assuming that these horses work for six 
months out of the twelve continuously, and that, as Mr. Morton 
shows, each horse does the work of 32 men, it becomes clear 
that if we were entirely without such implements as are actuated 
by horses, or in the condition of pre-implement-using man, we 
should need 32 times 400,000, or some 12,000,000 pairs of 
hands, to replace the horses now employed in British agri- 
culture. . . . Being presumably without implements of any 
kind, we should require to spend nearly ten times more than we 
now do upon agricultural labour in order to raise the same 
amount of cropping." I need not go into the question of 
steam-power ; it is sufficient to mention that one theoretical 
horse-power developed by the steam-engine is considered as 
effective as the power of two actual horses, and is infinitely 
more economical. 
The determination of the agricultural value of spade-cul- 
tivation, as compared with the results obtained by means of the 
plough and the cultivator in otherwise identical circumstances, 
has never yet been made in a scientific manner, so far as I 
know. But Mr. G. W. Latham, M.P., asserts (p. 181), as the 
result of his long experience, that, " as compared with plough- 
work, we require at least half more manure, and all our crops 
ripen ten to fourteen days later ;" but against this I ought to 
quote Mr. Sturge's statistics of the crops grown at Stoke Farm, 
for a series of years, as given on p. 203. It would certainly be 
most interesting and useful if experiments on this question could 
be carried out on different soils, and under different climatic 
conditions. It is scarcely necessary to add that there are some 
agricultural operations in which the spade is the only possible 
implement for, at any rate, a portion of the processes. Draining, 
and reclamation under certain conditions, may be quoted as 
examples. But these operations come under the head of " Per- 
manent Improvements," and may properly be charged to the 
Capital account, whereas the ordinary cultivation of the land 
from year to year must be charged to the Income account ; and 
by spade-labour, as I have shown, it is vastly too expensive to 
be remunerative. 
This part of the subject is, however, quite subsidiary to the 
main question which I have endeavoured to illustrate, namely, 
the professional and educational advantage of combining tech- 
nical instruction with general education in the elementary 
