578 
Agricultural Statistics. 
ing through ' Blue books ;' but we shall endeavour to save our 
fellow-traveller unnecessary tedium, in pointing out what is most 
worth his notice. 
The fiist, chronologically taken, is Mr. Hall Maxwell's ' Report 
of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland to the Board 
of Trade, on the Agricultural Statistics of Scotland for 1854.' 
Mark well the title. Here we have an Agricultural Society in its 
true place and doing its true work. Having through half a 
century's seniority over our own, affiliated and attached to itself 
all the local Agricultural Societies of Scotland, partaking and 
assisting in the arrangement of their exhibitions, contributing to 
their prize lists, acting in every way as an auxiliary and diffusive 
power, it has earned for itself the confidence and the position to 
be able to afford at once a prompt and effective aid to Govern- 
ment in a work especially needing the aid of local influence. In 
the person of its secretary, Mr. Hall Maxwell, the precise article 
was found which in England we have not, — a sort of Agricultural 
Chancellor whose writ would run everywhere, whose position 
made him recognised from one end of Scotland to the other, 
as a safe medium for the farmer : somebody whose recommenda- 
tion might be trusted by them, and whose agency could on the 
other hand be securely relied on by the Government. Here 
indeed is ' centralization ' it is true, and of a very pleasant, healthy- 
grown description. In England we have a specimen of the 
exactly opposite kind, one of the most unpopular, and not the 
less because most undeservedly so, of modern institutions, 
in the Poor Law Board. As ill luck would have it, this 
was the destined alembic through which our first essay in Agri- 
cultural Statistics in England was to pass. As a mere asso- 
ciation of terms and ideas, nothing could, we repeat, be more 
unlucky. Association of idea is not a very logical entity, but it 
is one which owes terrible power to its very irrationality : for its 
effect, " more swift than meditation," " outrunning the pauser, 
reason," appeals to the imagination and the prejudice. What 
machinery readier, what more exactly put together as if for the 
very purpose, than the 'Board of Guardians' as a shrewd statis- 
tical committee, rich in local knowledge, its able arithmetical 
clerk as Classifier, its relieving officer as Enumerator to deliver 
and return the schedules of the occupiers? But the oil was 
wanting to make it work, that one little potent lubricant, prestige. 
That fatal monosyllable ' poor,' unpopular at best, is especially 
dangerous in composition. It is a prejudice, no doubt, but, some- 
how, anything connected with Poor-law machinery has a sort of 
effect upon the English farmer not unlike those side glimpses of por- 
tions of the rack, through some half-open door, which the histories 
of the Bastile and the Inquisition bring to mind : and as to making 
