REPORT ON THE INDUSTRY OF MANURES. 
125 
But the same mighty power of steam which brought about the centralization of the 
manufacturing population in great towns, with the evils thence ensuing, and the sani¬ 
tary ameliorations by which those evils were (in part) subdued, came fraught with 
other principles also, and other events not less influential in the development of the 
manurial industry. 
Among these, the most conspicuously important, in their bearing upon this great in¬ 
dustry, were the doctrine and practice of free trade. 
The histoi’ical affiliation of free trade to steam-power is direct and obvious. 
The millions congregated by steam-power had to be fed. To the working of the new 
factory system cheap corn was as necessary as cheap coal. The restriction of bread 
supplies, and the consequent enhancement of their price by artificial means, to benefit 
a class, became utterly inadmissible. 
Protection, always a fallacy, was now also an anachronism ; and, after a severe 
struggle, and a long series of transitional expedients, the ports of England were thrown 
open freely to foreign supplies of food. 
The cultivators of this cold northern soil were thus exposed to the competition of 
rival food-growers, tilling, beneath warmer suns, the more prolific cornfields of the 
south. 
Upon this unequal competition the English territorial proprietors entered, as upon 
a struggle for life or death. Abundant manuring seemed at the outset their main, if 
not their sole resource; hence the rapid and prodigious development (already noted) 
of the guano trade ; hence the multiplication of manurial products from every form 
of waste, as manifested in the patent records ; hence the celebrated “ nitrogen theory ” 
and the “ high-farming ” system, to which allusion will presently be made ; hence, 
lastly, that ransacking of the whole world for bones, so criminal in Liebig’s view. 
Application of Steam-Power to Agriculture. —But steam-power, which has imposed 
upon the British cultivator this struggle for existence, brings him also the means of 
issuing victorious from the encounter. 
Why may not the steam-urged ploughshare pass to and fro through the field, as the 
steam-driven shuttle passes through the fabric in the loom ? 
If pure water can be pumped by steam-power at an infinitesimal cost into a town 
for its supply, why may not the very same water, enriched with the ejecta of the po¬ 
pulation, and so converted into a powerful manure, be also pumped out of the town 
by steam-power, and applied to maintain the fertility of the land ? 
In a word, why may not husbandry rise, in its turn, from the rank of a handicraft 
to that of a manufacture ; the farm be organized and worked like a factory ; and food, 
like every other commodity, be at length produced by steam-power ? 
These questions are now in every mouth; and the agricultural revolution they 
imply appears to be, at this moment, in course of accomplishment by the English 
people. 
Already, on many an English farm, the characteristic tall factory-chimney is 
seen rising among the trees ; the steam-engine is heard panting below ; and the 
rapid thrashing-wheel, with its noisy revolutions, supersedes the labourer’s tardy flail. 
Already, at somewhat fewer points, the farm-locomotive stands smoking in the field, 
winding to and fro, round anchored windlass, the slender rope of steel which draws 
the rapid ploughshare through the soil; thus furrowed twice as deep, and thrice as 
fast, as formerly by man and horse; and thus economically enriched with propor¬ 
tionately increased supplies of atmospheric plant-food. 
And lastly, already, at still rarer intervals, the subterranean pipes for sewage-irriga¬ 
tion ramify beneath the fields, precisely as the pipes for water distribution ramify be¬ 
neath the streets of the adjacent town ; the propelling power being, in both cases, 
that of steam. 
These innovations are, doubtless, still experimental; and, like all innovations, they 
are vaunted by some with premature zeal as perfect, while others, with pardonable 
scepticism, decry them as utterly impracticable. Truth for the present seems to lie be¬ 
tween these extremes. The steam-plough, though answering well in large and level 
fields with favourable soils, still requires adaptation to less easy conditions of tillage. 
The tubular irrigating system is still liable to the sudden influx of storm-waters, over¬ 
burdening, and often overmastering the steam-pumps, so as seriously to interfere with 
YOL. VI. L 
