550 
Report on the Farm-Prize Competition of 1885. 
The county roads also must be considerably improved since 
the days when Arthur Young wrote to the effect that it took a 
week or more for a coach to go from London to Edinburgh, 
and stated that " On that infernal road between Preston and 
Wigan, the ruts were four feet deep ! and he saw three carts 
break down in a mile of road." On the whole, the roads must 
now, I think, be considered good, so far as we were able to 
judge in the course of our travels, which sometimes necessitated 
our driving thirty or forty miles a day. Not, however, that we 
enjoyed driving on the roads paved with cobble stones, common 
in some of the peat-bog districts, and which gave, in driving 
over them, the same peculiar sensation of vibration as a galvanic 
battery ; but it is quite possible that it is the best and only 
durable road across a peat bog, where there is no available road 
metal, and where, if it existed, there is no foundation on which 
to lay it. 
For markets in Lancashire there is no lack ; they are capable 
indeed of affording a ready sale for all the produce (of the class 
before alluded to) that every acre within a certain radius is 
capable of growing. Consequently, those farmers who study to 
supply what is wanted, run very little risk of not being able to 
sell it at a fair price. In the sale of wheat, perhaps they are not 
better off than other people ; and they may be familiar with the 
stern outspoken reproof of the miller or corn merchant, who, 
on looking at your sample of good sound English wheat, and 
hearing you name your modest price, only replies by showing 
you a handful of foreign, dry as shot, and of a colour which is 
certainly all the better, because it has never experienced a 
shower of rain. On hearing the price of this wheat you 
feel there is nothing more to be said ; the spirit of repartee is 
crushed within you, you go away sorrowful. But this is not 
quite so serious a matter in what may be called " suburban " 
farming as in a case where the corn has to pay the rpnt, and 
something more besides, and there is little else to fall back 
upon ; in such a case what is a farmer to do when he is told 
" that there happens to be an over-production of wheat of a 
much better quality than his own, throughout the world " ? 
Try something else, is good advice, but not always easy to 
follow. 
At any rate, most of the farmers with whom the Judges had 
to do have as many strings to their bow as most people, and 
make as good use of them too. Messrs. Sherwin and Callwood 
are less within the vortex of the Manchester and Liverpool 
markets than the other competitors noticed in this Report, and 
they therefore adopt a more genei al style of farming ; still even 
they are considerably influenced by the Manchester market, 
