The Survival in Farming. 
275 
results, provided that he has capital enough for his acreage ; or 
that fifty-acre farmers can get a good livdng by growing corn 
and keeping a small number of live stock. In favourable 
situations for marketing milk, butter, fruit, vegetables, eggs and 
poultry, small farmers who are shrewd and industrious may do 
well ; and cheese-makers on small holdings have always been 
able to liold their own, if they and their wives were good and 
skilful managers. But any experiment in setting small farmers 
up in business with State funds will be too artificial to succeed. 
A good deal might be done by and for farmers to give them 
a better chance of success than they enjoy at present. Co- 
operation in buttermaking, and in tlie purchase of what they 
require, and the sale of their products, has yet to be tried in this 
country on an extensive scale and under the best conditions. 
Railway companies must be induced or compelled to treat 
farmers fairly, and to encourage traffic which they now handicap. 
Encouragement, too, should be given to the enterprising invest- 
ment of capital by tenants by making it more secui'e than it is 
at present. 
If space were available strong evidence might be cited in 
support of the opinion that the worst days of agi-icultural 
depression are over, and that a gradual, if slow, recovery of 
prosperity for British agriculture — indeed, for agriculture in the 
world at large — may be expected. If this anticipation should 
prove true, there will be even stronger reasons than can be given 
at present for predicting that the survival in farming will not be 
the exhausting system now general in America, or the penurious 
slavery inherent to a peasant proprietary, but that it will be a 
system of judicious high farming, in accordance with the prac- 
tice which has made the finest type of British agriculture the 
best in the world. 
William E. Bear. 
THE WORK OF ACIDITY IN CHEESE- 
MAKING. 
If you talk to an intelligent British cheese-maker about the 
practice of his art, and interrogate him about the conditions 
which have to be fulfilled in order to carry it on successfully, he 
is pretty sure, especially if he be of the Cheddar " persuasion," to 
make " acidity " the burden of his discourse. He has learned 
by experience that in some way or other — he does not know pre- 
