the usual time, there has been excellent grazing since. It is quite a spectacle,—the sleek enjoyment of the kine in their pasture of vivid green, when the rains intermit so as to let them graze. But the whole chapter of the hay is dismal. Even where the mowing machine was used, the grass lay soaking and drying alternately for weeks. In the bright morning the haymakers trooped out, and worked till noon, when the clouds hurried up and spoiled all. Or, after a rainy morning, and a bright clearing at noon, all hands would go to work for as long as they could see; but before sunset they were driven home by wet, which lasted all night and for days afterwards. In half a dozen fields and meadows I have seen parties of labourers at work for weeks, at four or five shillings a day each, in this useless way. I have seen no small quantity, cut and made at this cost, choking up the channel of the brook, or swimming in the flood. I have seen it turning brown and grey on the ground, and then almost black, till it seemed hardly worth carrying; and, finally, I saw on Sunday a party of haymakers sent into the field after church,—a thing never done but in extremity,—and, after working for a couple of hours, driven away by the pitiless rain. All this time the oats and potatoes have been a great anxiety to the farmer. The promise of both was very fine; but the grain is prostrated under the rain and strong winds, and the root has rotted. Now, these things must be admitted to be as trying to human patience as can well be. If the farmer had been told on New Year’s-day that his loss in the year would amount to so much, he might bear it as the manufacturer puts up with a sudden depreciation in the value of his stock, and the merchant with a bad debt: but the long and varying suspense, and the singular aspect of spitefulness in the weather of such years as the two last, certainly constitute a peculiar trial to the farmer. As far as I can learn, our countrymen bear it with true British manliness. We used to hear of agriculture “coming to Parliament whining for protection.” Now that protection is over, we hear no more about whining. Every order of producers is now above it.
As for society generally, it has come to understand the bearings of a good or a bad harvest. Of a good harvest I need say nothing; for it speaks for itself. A bad one, we now know, means, in the first place, the throwing away of several millions of money. We generally spend twenty millions in the purchase of grain and flour. We do not grudge it, though it is an unproductive expenditure. We do not grudge it because we cannot (or we suppose we cannot) grow enough at home for our consumption; and of course we must in the first place be fed. But we feel differently when we have to spend another ten or twelve millions in buying as much grain as we have seen rotting or failing in our own fields. The failure of last year’s harvest has cost us in actual money twenty millions more than the average expenditure: and every man of intelligence now, clergy or lay, understands what this means. Instead of simpering and averring that “there always is a harvest,” the most exclusive members of society know that this tremendous loss of capital restricts expenditure through all ranks, sets everybody economising, slackens manufacture, diminishes earnings, and affects the money market injuriously by carrying away our gold to foreign countries: for we must have the grain and flour, whether the countries which produce it can or cannot take any of our products in exchange. If they do not want our goods, we must pay in gold. In short, put it in any way you like, the badness of last year’s harvest caused us a dead loss of twenty millions direct; besides inflicting a variety of inconveniences and troubles.
The special trial of this year has been the uncertainty. Last autumn, and the frosts of midwinter, taught us that we could not have a harvest above the average: but whether an average, or how much less, has been a question almost to the last moment. It will even now take some weeks to satisfy us of our precise position; but we are certain that, on the whole, we are not unfortunate, and that at last we have left behind us the mischiefs of the bad harvest of 1860. We should still have felt them if we had had a second such harvest, because the protracted competition with other nations in the grain market would have made foreign wheat and flour very costly to us. Now that we shall want to buy little more than our regular quantity, we and the French shall not be bidding against each other, constantly enhancing the price of food to each other.
I never remember the reports of the crops being more various than they have been since the spring equinox. Up to that time, all the news from all quarters was equally bad. A very small proportion of our farmers had, by a thorough and systematic use of agricultural machinery, got their harvest cleared away, and their seed in, in spite of the malice of the weather; and where this was best done, the wheats stood the winter best. The less advanced practitioners made nothing of their land at all, and could only hope for an early and favourable spring.
It would be difficult to say what the spring was, for the whole season has been singularly various in different parts of our islands. In parts of Scotland my description of our drought and rains would be testified to as a fair account of the spring and summer; while in other places the spring has been wet and the summer dry, or each has been both. On the whole, by what I can gather from the sum of agricultural reports, the wheat crop is decidedly below an average, but a considerable portion of it of remarkably fine quality. The unfitness of last year’s barley for malting purposes was an evil of wide operation. This year, the quality is supposed to be very fine.
Some people tell us that oats are now about the best crop; but the real character of the whole oat crop is never known much before the end of September; and there is certainly a good deal so laid and broken as to be scarcely susceptible of cutting,—yellow, matted, and almost mouldy near the ground. The fate of the potato came upon us almost like a surprise,—so fine was the promise up to July. It is a great misfortune; but we shall feel almost as if we deserved it till we have either discovered the nature of the disease, or left off running the risks of potato-growing for some years till we can begin afresh, with new sets on a