680 Agricultural Depression at Home and Abroad. 
that those persons who suppose that agriculture can be saved by 
making labourers owners of small farms would do well to 
reconsider their conclusions. As to Mr. Pringle’s harrowing 
description of the ruinous state of agriculture in the Ongar, 
Chelmsford, Maldon, and Braintree districts of Essex, it has 
been made so familiar to all readers of newspapers that de- 
tailed reference to it is hardly necessary. It includes state- 
ments to the effect that rents have been reduced by 25 to 80 
per cent, generally, while some have been entirely extinguished, 
many farms having been offered rent-free to any tenants who 
will pay tithes and rates. Great tracts of land have been 
thrown on the landlords’ hands, and to a large extent have 
gone out of cultivation. The number of farmers who have given 
up their holdings, most of them after having been ruined, is 
said to be very great. 
Although Scotland has suffered less severely than England 
from the fall in the prices of corn, Mr. James Hope found that 
“ depression of a very acute kind ” had prevailed in the counties 
of Perth, Fife, Forfar, and Aberdeen during the ten years end- 
ing with 1893. In a number of farm balance-sheets examined 
by him the balance in almost all cases was on the wrong side, 
except for two years out of the ten, although rents had been 
reduced by 10 to 50 per cent., or by about 30 per cent, on the 
average. 
Mr. Hope’s reports conclude the first batch ; but reports from 
many other counties in England and Scotland will probably be 
in the hands of the public before this article is published. 
In addition to the reports of the Assistant Commissioners a 
bulky volume of evidence, taken by the Commissioners them- 
selves, has been issued, containing striking accounts of depression 
on the estates of the Crown, the Duchies of Lancaster and Corn- 
wall, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and Guy’s Hospital in 
several counties, and by other witnesses from the counties of 
Nottingham, Leicester, Stafford, Lincoln, York, Devon, Corn- 
wall, Bucks, Dorset, Oxford, Essex, Suffolk, Kent, Sussex, 
Cambs, Berks, Hunts, Northampton, Derby, Gloucester, Hants, 
Wilts, Somerset, Lancaster, Chester, Cumberland, and North- 
umberland. In the space available to me it is impossible to give 
even the most condensed analysis of this voluminous evidence ; 
but it may be interesting to readers to see a tabulated account 
of the reductions of rent which were mentioned by witnesses as 
having taken place in the several counties or parts of them, as 
a rule, since 1879 or some subsequent year. It will be under- 
stood that most of these percentages are only the estimates of 
individual men, and that some of them relate to limited dis- 
