586 
Agricultural Statistics. 
men of higher standing or more valuable capabilities engaged in 
the public service than those who hold that title, and devote 
their legal and scientific prowess to the carrying out like faithful 
knight-errants the decrees, partaking scantly in the pleasures, 
of that sempiternal Round-table which imagination delights to 
picture, at Somerset-house. But what possible connection of 
thought was it that suggested the idea of turning their lances 
into reaping-hooks ? By what ' discourse of reason ' could the 
conclusion have been evolved that the fit and proper medium 
through which to invoke the agrestial mind of England and 
Wales to the nature and benefits of agricultural statistics was 
a body of gentlemen who either by education, habits, or official 
experience, were not in conscience bound to know a wheat from 
a barley-rick ? 
And still more does the question obtrude itself, why at the 
turn of every leaf of the Report one is compelled to knock one's 
head against the ' Board of Guardians ? ' What has this re- 
spectable but proverbially indurated body got to do with the 
matter ? Did the originator of the adoption of this part of the 
proposed machinery ever hear the motto, " Divide, et impera " ? 
If not, we venture to submit a short psychological reflection upon 
this text in the words used by no less an authority than Sir John 
Walsham in liis late evidence before the Lords' Committee : — 
" Certain j^ersons will always object to making returns. It is impossible 
to analj'se all the motives influencing a man's mind in these mattei-s. I have 
known myself — it has been within my own knowledge — that perha])s three- 
fonrths of a certain number of farmers woiild make the returns if left to 
themscluea ; but when they get toyetltcr, say, at market, with the other fourth, 
■who will not hear of making any returns, the passive majority are sure to be 
led by the active minority to withhold the returns they might otherwise have 
given." — p. 38. 
Our mildest experience joins in attestation of every word of 
this philosophy ; but why stop at the market-place? for if such 
may be said of the green, what shall be said of the dry ? If this 
be true of the semi-ruial corn-maiket under the free canopy of 
heaven, how much more in the loaded atmosphere of that many- 
titled inner-chamber where, from time to time, vestry-meeting, 
parish-club, or other provincial noun-collective, rivals tlie close 
packing of the jury-box without its unanimity, the wrangling of 
the Old Bailey without its ancestral wit ! 
But how to reconcile with it the following, extracted from 
the same evidence, we confess to feel somewhat at a loss : — 
" In 1853 the President of the Toor Law Board asked me whetlier in my 
opinion agiicultural statistics could be collected in Norfolk (being the county 
then specified) through the agency of boards of guardians I gave an 
unhesitating opinion that, through the agency of boards of guardians and their 
officers, agricultural statistics could be collected with less friction, and 
