584 
Agricultural Statistics. 
returns, I should yet be constrained to state that, in my own matured judg- 
ment, agricultural statistics cannot be generally collected in England, unless the 
completion and due return of the schedules be made compulsory on owners and 
occupiers by act of parliament. 
" 1 do not, however, apprehend that such a legislative enactment would 
excite much if any ill feeling. The very persons whose opposition it has been 
found impracticable to overcome, usually coupled their refusals to furnish 
information with expressions significant of their readiness to give such infor- 
mation if asked for (as they termed it) ' constitutionally ;' and from those, on 
the other hand, who have either done all in their power to promote the object 
of the legislature, or who have complied, though perhaps against the grain, 
with the request addressed to them, I have received multiplied assurances, 
almost in the very words with which the chairman of one of the largest 
Norfolk Unions, a gentleman of great experience, has concluded a note now 
before me, that ' the greater number of our farmers wish to have the system 
made compulsorj^ and till that is done no very accurate returns will be 
obtained.' " * 
It is needless to quote passages to the same effect in the 
Reports of the Inspectors in whose districts lay the other counties 
of England and Wales in which the experiment was made : of 
Mr. Hawlej in Hampshire and Wiltshire, Mr, Weale in Lei- 
cestershire, Mr. Graves in Worcestershire and Brecon, Mr. 
Pigott in Berkshire, and Mr. Doyle in Salop and Denbigh. In 
one of the Poor-Law Unions of Berkshire no fewer than 17 
parishes out of 34 made no return, and in one the overseer re- 
fused to produce the rate-book. But a large farmer in one of 
the counties mentioned in Mr. Doyle's Report, seems to have 
been afflicted by so acute a sense of agrestial invasion at the 
blank sight of 'Schedule A.' that mere words were inadequate to 
express it. Letting fall upon the unlucky document the full 
measure of suspicious wrath, he divides it bodily into what Mr. 
Doyle describes as " nearly four pieces," and returns the disjected 
fragment indorsed as follows : — 
" The Idea of such Questions ! Wuat Next? Wm. Tarte." 
But why this angry astonishment and sharp suspicion ? Is in- 
telligence at so low an ebb among the shrewd sons of Scotland and 
of Yorkshire that they should fail to penetrate the dangers wrapped 
up in the folds of a statistical schedule ? Surely the net is 
spread in vain in the sight of any bird ; and if the coils and 
meshes, the ' miching mallecho ' of mischief, be so transparent 
in agricultural statistics, these birds would scarcely have been 
the last to fnid it out and the first to step in. 
But who could ever argue with suspicion ? By its very nature 
it is shaped to bid defiance to the artillery of reasoning. He 
who attempts to answer it is like one who saws the branch he 
sits on. Every word he utters, every effort he makes, is fresh fuel 
to the fire he is striving to quench. It is the most hopelessly 
* ' Reports of Poor Law Inspectors on Agricultural Statistics,' (England,) 1854. 
