2 The Foundation of the Royal Agricultural Society, 
In the absence of a narrative by one who could speak from 
personal experience, it was judged best that the office of chroni- 
cler of the earliest doings of the Society should be undertaken 
as an official duty by the Secretary, who had the readiest access 
to its records and minutes ; and to that decision is due the fact 
that the honourable duty of contributing the first article in the 
New Series has fallen to the present writer. 
The commencement of the Royal Agricultural Society took 
place, as Sir Harry Thompson has well put it, " during one of 
those recurring fits of associative activity to which Englishmen 
are periodically prone." It was at the annual dinner of the 
Smithfield Club, held at the Freemasons' Tavern, Great Queen 
Street, on December 11, 1837, that the project of establishing a 
new Society for the encouragement and development of British 
agriculture was first publicly mooted. The leading figure in 
this movement was Earl Spencer, better known throughout the 
greater part of his life as Lord Althorp, a nobleman who may 
be regarded as, par excellence, the originator of the Society. 
"When proposing, in his capacity as President, " Success to 
the Smithfield Chtb," Earl Spencer observed that their atten- 
tion should not be confined to cattle alone, but should also be 
directed to the general interests of farming ; for he could say, 
from his own experience, that agriculture was capable of much 
improvement. His lordship (whose observations were received 
in the most enthusiastic manner by one of the largest meetings 
of agriculturists ever assembled at the dinner of the Club) went 
on to say that he had himself observed how much, of late years, 
farms had improved, but it was his sincere belief that farming 
in England was yet in its infancy ; and he gave utterance to 
an expression which has since formed the keynote of the then 
unborn Society's operations, and was soon to become embodied 
in a now familiar motto. 
" The application of science to practice " (said Lord Spencer) " was not as 
yet made by the English farmer; but if the experiments that had^heen 
successfully tried elsewhere were made intelligible to him, and the practi- 
cability of them explained, he had no doubt but that an improvement would 
soon take place that few had any conception of. If a Society were esta- 
blished for agricultural purposes exclusively, he hesitated not to say that it 
would be productive of the most essentiul benefits to the British farmer. . . . 
There was one point, however, which he must strongly impress upon them, 
in reference to the formation of a Society such as he had mentioned — namely, 
that there could be no prospect of their obtaining any useful results, unless 
politics, and the discussion of all matters which might become subjects of 
legislative enactment, were scrupulously avoided at their meetings." 
It will bo seen that at the close of this passage, as at its 
commencement, Earl Spencer, with remarkable prescience, 
touched in decided terms on the very points which have secured 
