Agricultural Statistics. 
561 
to unfold itself in an intrinsic and tangible shape ; and it is 
difficult to stifle the too late expression of regret, that one of the 
fiist efforts of the Rojal Agricultural Society was not directed 
to the establishment, under its own appropriate auspices, of a 
system of Statistical Returns, showing the actual employment of 
the soil throughout the kingdom, — a task for which the numbers, 
the distribution, and the general standing of its members, would 
have given it such pre-eminent advantage. 
We aie not to forget that at the period corresponding with 
this, in the last century, we had scarcely ceased to be an exporting 
country. In the twenty years, extending from 1773 to 1793, a 
sort of equipoise arrived, when imports and exports balanced 
each other with a nicety which marked the turning-point of our 
history as growers and consumers. From 1793 to the present 
time, importation, chequered in the early part of the century by 
the influences of war, bad harvests, and successive statutory 
enactments, was accompanied by immense inclosures of fresh 
land, upwards of five million acres having been brought under 
cultivation since that date. This resource substantially at an 
end, we have arrived at the alternative between increase of 
acreable produce at home, and the necessity of foreign 
purchase. 
At such a time in the economic history of a country an annual 
census of its food-produce becomes as imperative as it is interest- 
ing, had the collection of it no other object than to ascertain, at 
the earliest possible moment after harvest, the ratio of the pro- 
duce of the year to the known population ; we cannot say ' to 
the \novin consumption,^ because consumption being itself affected 
by price, is precisely one of those indeterminate elements in the 
problem which is the last to unfold itself, depending as it does 
on other causes connected in a circle with the first point we 
desire to ascertain. We know, for instance, that the general 
report vaguely arrived at, as hitherto, of the harvest, powerfully 
affects the money-market and the funds, that they in turn 
influence trade and manufactures, and that the activity of these 
(still admitting the influence of price) mainly governs the con- 
sumption of the year. 
Were it our sole object then to obtain as accurate and reliable 
a return of the harvest as the subject allowed, instead of a mere 
guess-work, founded on no certain data, the immediate result 
would be of the utmost importance, and that primarily to the 
grower himself, as will presently be shown. But the novelty 
of the application of statistics to this branch of our national 
industry may seem to require some remarks on the very nature 
of this science as a comparatively modern, and peculiar branch 
of knowledge. 
