Agricultural Statistics. 
555 
book, explains to the farmers of Suffolk the artjuinent for 
Agricultural Statistics, and introduces a sort of apology for his 
own earnest and enlightened advocacy of the measure. An 
illustration is seldom fully appreciated whose obviousness out- 
runs the sense of novelty ; but it is not the less due to Mr. Peirson, 
the Chairman of the Framlingham Farmers' Club,* to say, that in 
the effort to commend a dry and seemingly distasteful subject to 
the favour of his hearers, he could hardly have chosen a figure, 
whose aptness reposed on a sounder philosophy. We are 
' bound on a twelvemonth's voyage.' We, — consumers of earth's 
harvests, — are the passengers, some the crew may it be 
hoped, of such a ship : we touch at no half-way port, nor 
can we shorten the duration of our voyage. The great centre 
of light and heat, round which we travel, gives us but one 
harvest in the year — one opportunity of storing our vessel 
for her trip ; and though (to descend from the astronomical to 
the national) we are able to import from other shores that 
supplement of our local deficiency, which the world furnishes 
from its spare stock ; yet not one bushel of corn can we so 
obtain except for its equivalent in some superadded labour of our 
own, which still must turn its wages into food, and so become 
an appendix to the oiiginal demand upon the soil. In this 
re-active effect of imported food, the British corn-grower is pre- 
sented with an annually widening margin, an enlarging front, so 
to speak, of customers, whose imported supplies are the true 
measure of an excessive demand, overtaking the produce of his 
own furrows : and such is, in fact, the condition of husbandry in 
a country requiring to import, and able to pay for, a large 
amount of food beyond its own annual produce. 
But what is THAT? Amongst all the strange questions that 
curiosity or business should still have left, to ask, in a country 
of the busiest and best statists in the world, in the country of 
Domesday-Book — the oldest record of Land-statistics, it is said, 
in Europe, and of some of the earliest efforts ever made by a govern- 
ment to learn the produce of its harvests — what is more strange 
than that we have gone on importing corn as well as growing it, 
in the profoundest ignorance and apathy till the last few years, 
upon one of the most interesting, and, one should suppose, most 
primitive questions it is possible for a country to ask itself, and 
containing within itself the reply, to answer — What, in quantity 
and kind, is the food-produce of our own acres ? What is the 
home-grown portion of that immense consumption, say of corn 
alone, of which the imported supplement, gathered in every quarter 
of the globe from fields we did not sow, has now arrived at an 
annual average of nearly te?i million of quarters ? 
* See Reports of Poor-Law Inspectors on Agricultural Statistics (1854), p. 41. 
