568 
Af/ricuhural Statistics, 
our eyes to what has been done, or rather left undone, for the 
corresponding information and security of a business producing 
an annual value, calculated twenty years ago at nearly one hundred 
and thirty-three millions sterliuf/, with an invested capital stated, 
by the same authority, at 217,000,000/.* What addition the last 
twenty years have made to these figures we may each of us 
venture to guess, but actual data there are unhappily none. 
It will certainly appear not a little remarkable, the more 
closely the subject is examined, that the collection of the most 
complete body of agricultural statistics should ever have been 
regarded as a work of difficulty. The simplicity of the mea- 
surement of land, the permanence of the task once accomplished, 
the patent and unconcealable evidence of its crops, lying for 
weeks and months before the eye, together with the constant 
habit in the mind of every farmer of calculating the amount per 
acre of the growing crop, seem to suggest the question whether 
physical difficulty can properly be said to have ever really 
entered into the question. A kind of indifference, joined to 
incredulity as to the advantages to be obtained, a latent dread 
of publicity, that well-known terror of every trade and ' mystery ' 
in by-gone days, the too long fostered tendency to look more to 
the price to be got per bushel in the market, than the number of 
bushels per acre in the field, these have helped to obstruct the 
path of the agricultural census. Nor are they unaccompanied by 
better grounds of reason. The whole system that has grown up 
in this kingdom in regard to the tenancy of land has been too 
much calculated to keep up, incidentally, the bargaining attitude 
in the mind of the occupier. It is no blame to him if he should feel 
that he has counsel of his own to keep. Where Leases are not 
the rule, as they are in Scotland, indeed so little predominant 
as to be actually unappreciated by the tenant himself (a proof 
only that he has not seen enough to have experienced their 
advantage), the rent of land is always a kind of unknown 
quantity in working out the problem of agricultural profits. 
Nothing is more difficult than the apportionment of the claims 
of owner and occupier in the improved produce, or productive 
power, of land not let for legally defined periods. Granted 
that farms may be held just as long, and just as happily, with- 
out leases as with them, and may descend, as on large estates 
they commonly do, from generation to generation. This forms 
no real answer, because it affords no practical security from the 
* M'Culloch. Arthur Young, -writing thirty years earlier, estimates the farm 
produce of England at the higher figure of 145,800,000/. One of the best autho- 
rities, Mr. Stevenson, (Art. 'England,' in the Edinburgh Encyclopa:;dia,) states it 
at 1.31,066,000/., which, though made on a different basis of calculation, comes 
near enough to fortify M'Culloch's estimate, given above. See his Statistical 
Account of the British Empire, p. 5. 
