the perverse reserve of the corn-growers at home, which keeps him in the dark about how to conduct his transactions abroad; and society suffers from the constant and universal uncertainty about the supply of food. I believe and trust that the prejudice is giving way. Year by year we read of one or other parish or district in which the farmers consult on the subject of a system of agricultural statistics, and in which there is a growing majority of tenant farmers who declare that they have no objection to a note being made, by duly authorised persons, of the acreage which they devote to different crops, or to pasture, and of the number of their live stock: but there are still so many who object that no general scheme can yet be established. We still go on explaining that nobody wishes to pry into the affairs of A., B., or C. Nobody cares to know whether the wheat grown, and the cattle reared, belong to A., B., or C. The names of the men and their abodes, and the precise locality and extent of the farms, are of no consequence. What society wants is to learn, year by year, how much of the land of the kingdom is devoted to wheat growing, and barley, and oats, and roots, and what live stock we have to depend on for animal food. These facts could be learned, in spite of all opposition, as the League agents learned the agricultural condition of particular districts: but it would cost too much to do it without the co-operation of the farmers. The thing is actually achieved in Ireland, with the best results; and, for a time, it was done to a considerable extent in Scotland, without injury or offence to anybody; but the whole virtue of such a procedure is in its completeness; and there is no near prospect yet of such an agreement among the agricultural interest as will admit of any regular and constant estimate of the food-supply of the country, or as may make the trade in food as sound, and safe, and economical as the trade in other commodities. While this wilful obscurity is maintained, there must be a great deal of risk and of loss on all hands: the corn-trade must remain the most speculative of all the branches of commerce: farmers must be still liable to grow the crops which will be least wanted, and which will pay them worst: good seasons will ruin some while enriching others, and bad seasons will be more disastrous than they need be. It is abundantly plain that if the food-manufacturer saw his way as plainly as the manufacturer of clothing, or the importer of exotic productions, he would be less liable to loss than now, when all calculation as to demand is impossible; and more clear-sighted as to profit, in proportion to his certainty of what the national demand would be, and how it was likely to be met. The thing will be done. After all that has been effected towards making the English farmer a man-of-business, and his art one of precision, grounded on a scientific basis, the remaining step, of making his appropriation of his land a matter of calculation also, must surely be taken before long: but meantime there is no year in which the agricultural interest does not incur risks, and the nation at large suffer anxiety and loss, from the absence of a sound system of Agricultural Statistics.
The effect this year has been so remarkable as to attract much notice. It has exposed us to the charge of cowardice and folly, from the way in which we have been talking about the harvest for the last six months. I have watched the process very closely, and with ever-increasing wonder,—as I know that others have done. From my mountain perch I have, in a manner, overlooked the country as it lies between the four seas, and listened to the speculations which the people were calling out to each other. There is no other subject on which so many people are always saying something as that of the Weather and the Crops; and never, within my experience, were the sayings so strange and so instructive.
In the absence of all authentic record of what the soil is intended to produce of various kinds of food, everybody is afraid of doing mischief by uttering unfavourable anticipations in regard to any one article. It is still considered a matter of religious trust, on the one hand, and of social duty and good manners, on the other, to assume that the harvest will be good. This year, the strenuousness of the effort has been remarkable. Almost everybody has been eager to be deceived, and to help to deceive others, from the dread of doing something ungrateful and mischievous in apprehending that the harvest would be bad, when it might turn out a good one after all—a habit of mind formed and fostered by the obscurity belonging to a defective organisation of agricultural industry. When the warm and beautiful month of February was over, and the rainy spring set in, it could be no secret that a worse seed-time had never been known: but it was a long way to harvest; and fine weather in the interval would set all right. Week after week, month after month passed on, and the fine weather did not come; yet, it seemed to me, there was more avowed confidence of a good harvest, the shorter the time became in which such a thing was possible; and the most sanguine paragraphs in the newspapers, all over the country, have been since a good harvest had become clearly impossible. In each particular place there was a wet soil, never warmed by any natural summer sunshine: in each particular place there were swarms of insects of every mischievous kind: they blighted the cereals, they arrested the growth of roots, they devoured the blossom and the fruit of orchard and garden. Everywhere there were fields ploughed up and resown; and everywhere there were blustering winds, when a calm atmosphere was needed for the blooming and fruiting of the corn, and cold weather when summer heat was wanted for the ripening of the grain. Yet, everywhere there were people talking of a harvest above the average. It might not be so in each person’s particular parish; but three hundred miles off everything was very promising, if the newspapers were to be trusted;—yet the authors of the newspaper reports were such sanguine people as these,—each emulating every other in giving cheerful pictures of the season. When a few real summer days came at last, the reporters were well pleased with themselves for having taken and given no alarm, though they should have admitted that it was then too late for any considerable retrieval of the crops. Such an admission would have been a matter of