592 
Agricultural Statistics. 
" Intercrit multum Davusne loqnatur an Heros," 
and it is scarcely fair to anticipate a judgment of the part it will 
perform until tliat cue has been appropriately given. The 
remark of Sir John Walsham above first quoted, goes, more per- 
haps than the speaker was at the time aware, to the whole root 
of the matter. A defect of unanimity, a nucleus of opposition, 
appears to have been unfortunately developed into being, we 
might almost say created, by the too hasty adoption of a frame- 
work whose traditional unpopularity was itself scarcely extinct, 
but which also embodied an element of characteristic tendency 
to the production of that ' active minority ' which, troublesome 
as it may sometimes seem, has been a not unuseful or despised 
feature of Anglo-Saxon constitution from the days of enlightened 
Tacitus to " the ignorant present time." 
It has not formed any part of our intention to exaggerate the 
argument against the collection of these statistics by means of 
the Poor-Law machinery. The departmental view of the ques- 
tion is entirely out of our province or aim, wliich, in fact, limit 
themselves expressly to the point of view from which an agricul- 
turist most naturally looks at an agricultural subject. But it is 
precisely in the strict indulgence of this line of thought that the 
question most instinctively arises in the form which our inquiry 
has taken, and that too under a review of events and circum- 
stances less likely to suggest itself to the mind of any one to 
whom the recent history of agriculture in this country has not 
been a matter of congenial study and almost daily notice. There 
is no pursuit in which men see so little of their own aggregate 
advancement, or have such unfrequent and imperfect opportu- 
nities of measuring the speed or judging of the ratio of the 
progress made. Still there is a conscious impressicm now widely 
existing in the agricultural world, and partaken of beyond it, of 
great and undeniable recent cliange, amounting almost to a silent 
revolution. Tlie unavoidably expanded sphere of action involved 
in the opening of the trade, the introduction and general use of 
artificial manures, the immense increase in the manufacture, and 
widely disseminated use, of improved implements, and new, 
powerful, and beautiful machinery, the higher tone and enlarged 
action of agricultural societies and even of its literature — these, 
which are but a prominent few of the causes that might be 
named, all of them intrinsically favourable to the introduction of 
an enlightening agency, such as a well-devised system of statistics, 
yet constitute a current whose pressure and direction are pecu- 
liarly inauspicious for the embarking a new system, however 
good, in a vessel freighted with old associations. The fate 
of new wine put into old bottles, if no longer a proverb will 
always recall a truth ; and we doubt if any leading agriculturist of 
