You tell us, however, that you have "plenty more" of as profitable instances of high farming, "for the instruction of Messrs Dudgeon and Watson, and the edification of the author of theBook of the Farm. From Ireland even, I could instance a small farm within my own knowledge, where, by the practice of house-feeding, an annual return, in dairy produce, of at least £400 is obtained from less than 60 imperial acres;" (p. 11.) When, in your first pamphlet, (see prefatory note, fifth edition,) you wrote that you had selected for exhibition a single example in the case of Auchness, implying that you had many more such cases to pick and choose from, I confess that I felt, at the time, that the statement was disingenuous. I utterly deny that you can produce one other case similar to Auchness, and that can parallel it in its advantages and in its profits, unless, indeed its balance-sheet is framed after the Auchness model. If you have plenty more such cases, why not mention them? Why keep them secret—aterra incognita—when the agricultural world is panting for information? You are like the cruel alchemist who discovered the philosopher's stone, but who, in sulky obstinacy, resolved to die without divulging the invaluable secret, and did so accordingly. Your present vaunt, I am inclined to look upon as idle braggadocio. In your gallop through Ireland, a case is reported to you of £400 being obtained from less than 60 acres in dairy produce. Are you quite sure that this was not a bit of blarney dropped into your credulous ear? It is not in the nature of an Irishman to refrain from "humbugging a Saxon bosthoon;" and that you were sometimes crammed and humbugged by the "wild Irish," is undeniable. (SeeDublin Evening Mailof 6th February last.) £400 was the annual return: you do not tell us what was the annual expenditure. The profit, whatever it might be, was only for one year. And it is by such isolated, unsupported, and apocryphal illustrations, that you now vindicate your high farming so called! Individual instances of extraordinary profit are within the knowledge of every farmer. In two several cases, I have known £100 sterling being got for one acre of carrots. The 260 acres at Auchness, at this rate, would give agrand annual result of £26,000. There is a balance-sheet for you!—there is a brave speculation. Try it, and never fear the worm.
In the mean time, there is only the one solitary case of Auchness which you have exhibited, and on this narrow basis you build your theory, and denounce all who question its authenticity, and who, if accepted as given, deny its fitness for universal adoption. You have "plenty more," you say, but, with a relentless taciturnity, you decline to tell us where they are to be found. And thus you fancy that you have met and overthrown the agricultural statistics published byBlackwoodin January last. You misunderstand or misrepresent the value of these statistics.Blackwood'sstatistics are applicable to the farming of the districts to which they severally refer, and not for one, but for the average of years of an ordinary lease, andunder existing covenants. If they had been the literal results and experience of the reporters on their own farms, as you, with reckless inattention, persist in representing them all to be, they would have been of little value, and they never could have been attested as they have been; and, on the other hand, they would have possessed as little value had they not been drawn up from the results of their own experience and practical knowledge. They have all the force of those tabular accounts of sales which mercantile men are in the habit of transmitting to their correspondents—containing not the exact dealings of any one merchant, which would be in a great measure useless, but communicating the actual state of the existing market. The tables inBlackwoodwere not intended to exhibit generally the highest ascertained capabilities of the best qualities of the soil, not to depict "the possible of agricultural development;" but to show how much agricultural knowledge, capital, and skill had actually accomplished on average soils, in an average of years. In this very fact consisted the value of their results: otherwise, they never could have proved the effects of Free Trade on Scottish agriculture generally. And then, the respective reports inBlackwoodare examined by others in the same districts. The examinators—gentlemen of known capacity and undoubted honour—having tested the reports by their own knowledge and experience, certify them as correct. We need not be surprised at the vast importance which has been attached toBlackwood'sstatistics, and at the countless and futile attempts which have been made, by those hostile to the interests of British agriculture, to contradict and deny their accuracy. How very different is your case! You give a solitary instance of a farm farmed by the factor of the estate, under a covenant so unboundedly liberal that it leaves the tenant to do anything he pleases, if he pays a moderate, in fact, a low rent for the ground. The lease was probably drawn by the factor himself; and, if it were not, the farmer could not wish it more liberal and indulgent. The relative position of the parties throws suspicion and doubt upon the whole case. Every one feels this. When the proprietor expended so large a sum of money in improving the farm of Auchness—receiving no rise of rent, but bare interest for his outlay—did he not mean to make it a suitable residence for his factor, and to constitute it a kind of experimental farm in the district? In the liberal covenant, is the factor's remuneration in part not included? Is the Auchness liberal covenant the exception, and not the rule, amongst the tenant-farmers of Wigtonshire? And then, while many have borne their testimony to the excellence of the crops, and to the management of the stock, not one has certiorated the Auchness balance-sheet, but yourself. In this branch of the case you are atestis singularis. You seem to hint that Mr Stephens might certify to your competency as a witness. But that gentleman maintains an ominous silence. The whole rests upon youripse dixit. And when the inquirer drops a gentle surmise, you turn round in a rage, and storm and stamp, proclaiming, at the top of your voice, "I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no dog bark."
With regard toBlackwood'sstatistics, you again and again admit their unchallengeable correctness.Their "facts," you say, "are too well vouched to be disputed; they will be admitted at once by any candid mind," (p. 5.) If it be so, then, in their position, the conclusion from the facts is inevitable. When you ask them to meet the altered times by growing wheat every year on the same ground—or, at least, biennially, over nearly the half of their farm—and by extending their quantity of green crop, and feeding off six times the quantity of stock, their answer is, that they cannot and dare not. The ordinary conditions of a lease, and the principles of any known system of rotation, are set at utter defiance at Auchness. When the moss sickens of the perpetual potato, its rebellion is punished by scarification. It is skinned of its cuticle to the depth of "a few inches," which is transported to the red-land fields, (p. 7, first pamph.) If it does not mend its manners, the invaluable moss will, after a period, disappear bodily, and the rent of the generous Col. M'Douall will be left to repose on the "lower silurian formation."
Blackwood'sfarmers are tied up by leases which they dare not violate—under penalties which the Auchness profits would not cover—and they have no accommodation for feeding the enormous quantity of stock which you prescribe for them. But if they could farm their land as they please, I question much if they would think it expedient to adopt the incessant cropping and the excessive stirring and stimulating of the soil by enormous and rapidly renewed doses of manure, as exemplified at Auchness. This system does admirablyfor a few yearson untried soil, having all its rude virgin vigour in it, like the Auchness farm, when it came into the hands of Mr M'Culloch. But, after a certain time, the infallible result, as far as the cereals are concerned, is a mass of rank vegetation and miserable grain, in respect both of quantity and weight. When the ultimate profits of the nineteen years' lease are regarded, and the desire to grow for a series of years true, and, at the same time, prolific corn crops is entertained, a prudent and skilful agriculturist may well pause before he plunges into the Auchness experiment. Mr M'Culloch may find, ere long, that his vexed and wearied land will demand more rest and repose than Mr Caird, by his further illustrations of high farming, would give it.
Nor is this all. Messrs Watson and Dudgeon, unlike Mr M'Culloch, are breeders of stock as well as feeders. Mr Watson, particularly, is one of the most eminent breeders in the kingdom. Although you may never have heard of them, his polled Angusshire cattle are somewhat celebrated. They have excited universal admiration over all the island, on the pastures at Windsor Castle, in Smithfield, and in the show-yards of the Highland and Agricultural Society. Most probably Mr Watson, like most men who have devoted much money and time to the improvement of our various breeds of stock, may not have profited largely by his enterprise: but who, yourself excepted, can doubt that he has, in this department, conferred more important benefits on the agriculture of the kingdom than a hundred such experiments as the Auchness potato culture can possibly effect? But if there is a breeding stock upon a farm, then the stock-feeding system, to the extent that is carried on at Auchness, is impossible. The young stock which are to be bred from, if they are to have healthy and sound constitutions, must be allowed the range of the open field for many months in the year. You boast of the stock fed at Auchness; I venture to say that more admirable specimens of cattle and sheep can be produced at Keillor or Spylaw—animals of more exquisite symmetry, size, and quality—than Mr M'Culloch ever has exhibited, or ever will exhibit, if he adheres to his present system. Cattle must be bred by some other party, or the Auchness feeding-system must stop for want of animals. Mr M'Culloch subsists upon the breeders of the country. He requires several farms, of the same extent as his own, to supply him with animals. It is highly unwise of you to urge upon this class the adoption of a different system, for, without their aid, there would be empty stalls at Auchness.
But in the production of grain you try to demonstrate that Messrs Watson, Dudgeon, and Gibson have sadly degenerated from their predecessors. In proof of this, you adduce the evidence of Messrs Brodie, East-Lothian, and Turnbull, South Belton, Dunbar, as given before a committee of the House of Commons, and quoted in theFarmer's Magazinefor 1814. You have given, however, a partial and one-sided sample of the evidence taken by this Parliamentary Committee. There are five gentlemen who gave evidence regarding the average produce of wheat per acre, two of whom only depone to the quantities of oats and barley grown per acre. It is in the article of wheat alone that the evidence can enable us satisfactorily to ascertain whether, since 1814, there has been an agricultural progress or an agricultural declension. Five of the agricultural tables inBlackwoodstate the average produce of wheat. Wheat is the great staple article of the nation's farinaceous food—that grain upon which the Free-traders repose all their calculations, and to the selection of which you cannot object, as it is the only grain you grow at Auchness for the people. Well, let us put the five agriculturists quoted byBlackwoodin juxtaposition with the five agriculturists whose evidence appears in the Parliamentary Report of 26th July 1814.
That is, the farmers quoted byBlackwoodhave on an average of good and bad years, on average land, been growing nearly 4½ bushels wheat more per acre, than the farmers, on the most fertile soils in the country, quoted in the Parliamentary Report of 1814. It is quite true that Messrs Brodie and Turnbull grow more oats and barley per acre than Messrs Watson and Dudgeon, on their average of years; and, you might have added, more than Mr M'Culloch did with his boasted high farming in the abundant crop of 1849. You say that the figures of Messrs Brodie and Turnbull give "their average produce for a series of years, and elaborate extracts from their books are adduced to corroborate them," (p. 14.) Now, in giving his evidence, Mr Brodie pointedly states that he had taken his farm "two years ago;" and therefore it could not be "for a series of years" that he gave the average produce of his farms. Mr Brodieproduced no extracts from his books, and altogether you misstate his case. Mr Turnbull's evidence is more copious. To the question—"What is your course of cropping?" his answer is—"My heavy land in a rotation of six—remainder, of about 80 acres, is in a rotation of four; 334 acres are under the plough; the remainder (20 acres) always in grass." And he describes his six-shift course, which applies to 250 acres of the whole arable land, to be—"Fallow, wheat, grass, oats, beans, and wheat." Mr Turnbull did grow more corn crops than Messrs Watson and Dudgeon; but you forget to tell your reader that, during your "cycle of thirty years," he had three-fourths of his farm, for five several years, in fallow, absolutely barren, and not producing a mouthful of bread or anything else, for the people. If the loss incurred during these five years of bare fallow is considered, and if regard is had not only to cereal produce, but to the cattle grown and fed on their pasturage, it may be safely concluded that Messrs Watson and Dudgeon are at least as large benefactors, in supplying food to the people from inferior soils, as Messrs Brodie and Turnbull were, on the very best lands in Scotland. You seem to fancy, because Mr Brodie valued his clover at£6, 6s. per acre, and his turnips at from £8 to £10 per acre, that, in the department of stock, he greatly excelled Messrs Watson and Dudgeon. You forget, again, to tell your reader that it was theScotch acrethat Mr Brodie spoke of: was this accident or ignorance? If this error is corrected, and if the exorbitant prices of butcher-meat at the period referred to are remembered, the value of the green crop, as assumed by Mr Brodie, will surprise no one.
Your whole case is based upon a garbled and partial collation of the evidence taken by Parliament; and independently of this, you totally misconceive and misinterpret the case, as quoted by you. The two farms referred to by you are about the very best in North Britain. Nor is this all: they were among the earliest and oldest cultivated soils in Scotland, according to the improved methods of husbandry then in practice. Previous to 1814, they were let at three times the rent of Keillor or Spylaw. There is a point beyond which you cannot raise the productiveness of the soil—when it revolts, and visits your avarice with sharp reprisals. This you admit in your first pamphlet, (p. 17.) The real question is this, had not Messrs Brodie and Turnbull raised the productive powers of their farms nearly or altogether to the maximum of the soil's fertility?—or, as you say, could they have insured a larger bulk of crop without the danger of lodging it? In the articles of barley and oats, most unquestionably they could not. Mr Brodie grew 48 bushels barley, and 57 bushels oats, per imperial acre; and Mr Turnbull 45 bushels barley, and 54 bushels oats, per imperial acre. On the very best soils, and by any kind of culture, and with as large an application of manure as you please, I defy you to grow, on an average of years, larger quantities than these.
Look now at the farms with which you compare Messrs Brodie's and Turnbull's. Take Spylaw. Previous to 1814, that farm was well-nigh in a state of primitive sterility: although ploughed, it was a quagmire; and the agriculture was what you poetically call according to "nature, which has no rotation of crops." Mr Dudgeon entered on the farm in 1824; and since that time he has doubled the produce of the grain, and quadrupled the quantity of the stock. Call you this nothing, young man!—nothing in the way of providing food for the million? Since 1814 or 1824, has the produce of grain been doubled, and the quantity of stock quadrupled, on the farms of Messrs Brodie and Turnbull? Nay, has there been any perceptible advance in the quantity of grain grown? Has the produce of the grain not remained stationary—and not from any want of skill or enterprise upon the part of the farmer, but simply because the soil, previous to 1814, had about reached the limit of its productiveness? By an enormous outlay, and by admirable skill and management, Mr Dudgeon has thus raised the productive powers of a soil naturally of a very inferior description—and not in abundant seasons, but on an average of years—up very nearly to the highest mark of the best land in the kingdom previous to 1814. The very same, I have no doubt, is the history of the agricultural progress that has taken place upon Mr Watson's farm; and, on the question of agricultural progress generally, the evidence, fortunately, is accessible to all inquirers. The volume of theFarmer's Magazinefor 1814, which you refer to, might have instructed you on this subject. An apparently well-qualified writer in that volume, states "22½ bushels wheat per acre as a high enough average for clay land in the best cultivated counties of Scotland," (p. 151.)
Your contrasting two of the choicest farms in all Scotland with the average soil of Forfarshire and Roxburghshire, indicates a want of fairness, and destroys the value of your criterion. Intending to depreciate, you unwittingly have pronounced a panegyric on the farming of Messrs Watson and Dudgeon. You have the hardihood to say, "that the annual produce reaped by Messrs Watson and Dudgeon has actually fallen off nearly a third from what it was in the days of their grandfathers!" This is a ridiculous blunder, and we have seen that your whole speculation on this subject is constructed on a series of wild errors, and illustratedby a Gothic ignorance of the past history of Scotch husbandry. Your poor taunt recoils upon yourself.
In summing up results, you tell us "that Mr Watson, at present prices, derives a gross return of £920 from 340 acres under wheat, grass, and turnips. Mr Dudgeon has £1087, 10s. from 360 acres under the same crops. And Mr M'Culloch has £1369, 16s. from 146 acres," (p. 17.) Now, supposing the hypothetical balance-sheet is to be received into court, there yet lurks under this summary a gross misstatement. Mr M'Culloch had no such return from his wheat, grass, and turnips on the 146 acres: £284 was expended for purchased food for the stock, and this contributed largely to the result, but reduces the return from the 146 acres to £1065, 16s. As well might the distiller who rents 40 acres, but who annually fattens hundreds of cattle upon the feeding stuffs furnished by his distillery, put down the immense sum of profit received from his cattle, as the return from the portion of the 40 acres under wheat, grass, and turnips. The error may be unintentional, but a more loose or fallacious statement of the fact is scarcely conceivable. You are guilty of a similar dereliction in p. 43, where you say that Mr Christopher, "from 270 acres under grass and green crops, derived under Protection a return in money of £710, much less than Mr M'Culloch's return under Free Trade from 91 acres of grass and green crop." In fact, Mr M'Culloch's return from the 91 acresmaybe, (for it is not realised,) £600.
In this veracious fashion you illustrate the "results of high farming under Free Trade, and ordinary farming under Protection." A most extraordinary simpleton will he be who receives without hesitation the Auchness balance-sheet, and your rose-coloured illustrations of high farming. "What would have been the position," you ask, "of the country, if the food of the people had depended exclusively on such exertions as those of Messrs Dudgeon, Watson, and Low? By their rules, the half of the population ought to have been starved long ago; and if the produce of the country has in any degree kept pace with the increase of its population, we are not indebted for it to them," (p. 16.) To whom, then, are you indebted? Not to the Auchness husbandry, which is a prodigy of yesterday's growth—not to Mr M'Culloch and his attendant satellite; for it is only six months since these luminaries appeared in the western hemisphere. You are indebted, and could be indebted, for the result, to no other parties butBlackwood'sfarmers and their contemporaries. The people ought to have been starved, you say; yes, but they have not been starved, and that fact demonstrates the falsehood of your premises, and renders their refutation unnecessary.
But, not content with thus stultifying your own allegation, you deliver yourself a few pages after, in a happy forgetfulness of what you had just written, in the following terms,—"Here, then, were some remarkable phenomena. A population doubled, the demand for food vastly increased, the foreigner practically excluded, and yet a steady fall in the price of our produce. How is this explained?" (p. 23.) Most inexplicable phenomena, indeed! Scottish farmers of the present generation growing a third less food than their grandfathers, (p. 15;) and yet, with a doubled population, there is an abundance of home-grown food, and a "steady fall in the price of our agricultural produce," (p. 23.) You proceed then manfully to refute yourself, to demolish your own theory, and to rebut and expose what you had written a few pages before; and all this you accomplish with a very creditable success. This proceeding on your part was in the highest degree kind, clever, and considerate. There can be no doubt, as you show, (p. 24,) that it has been in consequence of the progressive improvement in domestic agriculture, that the supply of food has kept pace with the increasing population; and there can be no doubt that this would have continued to be the case, without making us dependent on foreigners for our daily bread, had not Free-trade legislation laid a fatal arrestment on the progress of British agriculture.
You talk wisely on the advantages attending the introduction of bones and guano, and contemptuouslyof Messrs Watson and Dudgeon, as adhering slavishly to some obsolete system of farming, "stereotyped for them years ago in the books of Professor Low or Mr Stephens." You write this in great ignorance, or in unhappy perversity of temper. Nearly thirty years ago, Mr Watson erected costly machinery for crushing bones, and was at great trouble and expense in testing their value as a manure, and recommending them to his brother farmers; and, in appreciation of his services, they presented him with a valuable piece of plate. (SeeJournal of Agriculture.) Mr Dudgeon was the very first to report practically to the Highland and Agricultural Society, in 1842, upon the value of guano as applied to the turnip crop, and in the following year had nearly 100 acres of this crop manured with guano, when otherwise the whole breadth of turnips, in the county of Roxburgh, raised with this manure did not reach to this extent. In fact, the very parties whom you affect to sneer at, and their compeers, are the very parties who have raised the character of Scottish farming, and rendered it famous over the world. It is no common trial of the patience to hear them reviled by an inexperienced adventurer, whom the ferment of the times has thrown upon the surface of society.
You disparage the amount expended byBlackwood'sfarmers on labour, but you forget that they give it as an average expenditure over a series of years, and not for a year or two during the course of expensive improvements; and you expatiate on the tendency of the high farming at Auchness to give employment to an increasing population; and yet you tell us that, at Auchness, "machinery has been applied to every purpose in which labour can be economised about the steading," (p. 11.) The tendency to economise manual labour, and the tendency to increase employment for the agricultural labourers, seem somewhat contradictory and self-destructive features in the Auchness system.
From the account which you have given in your first pamphlet, of the agricultural condition of Auchness when it first fell into the hands of Mr M'Culloch, it appears to have been in a state of the most primitive and unparalleled barbarity. Receiving unwonted encouragement from the proprietor, he commenced a process of vigorous improvement, which he is accomplishing regardless of expense. By and by he will have achieved his object, and the outlay will be greatly diminished. We are not left to conjecture on this subject, for, in a note appended to his balance-sheet, Mr M'Culloch tells us, that, "next year the large sum for purchased manures will be reduced at least one-half;" and that he "will be able, in a year or two, to dispense altogether with the expenditure for purchased manures." The plain truth seems to be, that Mr M'Culloch is in course of doing whatBlackwood'sfarmers, Mr Dudgeon, and thousands of other farmers, have already done. What is the meaning, then, of all this ridiculous rant about the high farming at Auchness? If, at the end of twenty years, Mr M'Culloch can grow the crops whichBlackwood'sfarmers are now growing, and gets his facts attested as they have got theirs, it will prove very creditable management.
You ask whatBlackwood'sfarmers have done to multiply bread-stuffs for a growing population? That is a most singular question for the eulogist of the Auchness potato-husbandry to have hazarded. Towards the production of cereals there are only 55 acres set apart at Auchness—a smaller proportion than, perhaps, on any farm of similar extent and soil in the kingdom. The potato is the sheet-anchor of your wealth, and the staple food you grow for the people; and to this fickle root you devote more than a third of the whole farm. And yet is not the potato, as the main source of a people's food, which your system makes it, the very root of physical degradation, and the very type of moral wretchedness? Was not the excessive cultivation of the potato the main cause of Ireland's misery, and of the famine that desolated her shores? And was not the lesson derived by every thoughtful man, from the dread visitation, a conviction of the folly and peril of making this precarious root the mainstay of a people's food? and was not the hope cherished that the Great Ruler, whose prerogative it is to bring good out of evil, might over-rulethe pestilence and the famine to advance the improvement of Irish husbandry, and the comfort of the Irish people? But, in infatuated defiance of the warnings of Providence, and the stern lessons proclaimed by famine, you hold up, as a model for British farmers, a system of agriculture in which the most prominent feature is an excessive cultivation of the potato. Had British farmers, the growers of the nation's food, persisted after 1846, and in face of Parliamentary instructions, in growing the potato—not to the extent grown at Auchness, but to the extent to which they themselves grew it formerly—they would have deserved to have been cognosced and sent to Bedlam. Your agricultural economy is undeniably, in this respect, retrogressive; and its tendency, if generally adopted, is to plunge our country into the abyss of Irish misery. And yet you write magniloquently about the production of bread-stuffs and food for the people! You wonder that Mr Gibson of Woolmet, "commanding a metropolitan market, so little appreciates the advantages and necessities of his position that, instead of raising vegetable produce for that market," he persists in growing grain. Your wonder is the daughter of ignorance. You seem not to be aware of what is notorious, that there is already more ground cultivated by market-gardeners than is required to supply the citizens of Edinburgh. No class of the community feel the effects of Free Trade more than they do, as their early crops, on which they principally relied, are entirely forestalled by supplies from Hamburg, Rotterdam, and other foreign ports. Forgetting your advocacy of "bread-stuffs," you are high in your praises of "edible roots;" and vegetable productions must now, it appears, be the source of agricultural prosperity. Where could a market be found for table roots, if generally cultivated by the farmers of the kingdom? Man does not belong to the herbivorous tribes. Cabbages and colewort won't sustain him. Bread, to him, is the staff of life. Roots are a windy, watery diet; they breed melancholy and send vapoury fumes to the brain. We must have "cakes and ale" in spite of you.
You have favoured the world, in your present pamphlet, with some singularly original views on the subject of rent, which throw a flood of light on your theory of high farming and the liberal covenant, and which I think dissipate all the mystery and difficulty in which otherwise you had left these subjects surrounded.Blackwood'sfarmers, you say, "give us estimates of what they lose by Free Trade; and it is a remarkable circumstance that, in every case, the estimated loss might be converted into a profit, simply by changing the figure which they put down for rent!" (p. 28, 29.) Most notable discovery! Instead of being 32s. per acre, had Messrs Watson and Dudgeon's rent been 12s. or 2s. per acre, all would be right, says the new agricultural oracle. Who ever doubted this? And so, after much idle chaffering, and most wearisome circumlocution, the truth at last leaps to the light—the loss which the farmer incurs by Free Trade is to be converted into a profit simply bychanging the figure of the rent. The idea is admirable, and it is enunciated with exquisite coolness; and it possesses the sublime simplicity that distinguishes all the happy discoveries of genius. Lower the rent—bring it down to zero, if need be—and thus convert the tenant's loss by Free Trade into a profit. Most preposterous is it for the nation to be pestered with these Protection meetings, and to be disturbed by the agricultural depression, with so ready a remedy lying at the door. Agricultural distress flies the kingdom, simply by changing the figure of the rent. When once divulged, we wonder that we did not ourselves discover the grand truth. I am not exaggerating your prescription for agricultural difficulty—nor has it dropped from your penper incuriam—you reiterate the same view in your remarks upon Mr Munro's pamphlet, to indicate the importance you attach to it. Mr Munro, you write, "of course had to use his own discretion only as to the rotation of cropping, and might exterminate every head of game on his estate. He could have reduced the rent to please himself. Yet, possessing all these advantages, Mr Munro was unable to farm at a profit," (p. 31.)Mr Munro had fixed a rent on his land, such as he could have easily got from a competent tenant; but the intervention of Free Trade annihilated his profit. You are astonished at his simplicity. He could reduce his rent to please himself; and, by changing the figure, transmute his loss into a profit. Being both proprietor and tenant, he could play with impunity the game of "change the figures." He never could lose, for what the laird lost the tenant gained.Blackwood'sfarmers, in their unsophisticated simplicity, never seem to have dreamed of changing the figure. They may have been prevented by qualms of conscience. They may have questioned the morality of the proceeding, or doubted the propriety even of its political economy. 'Tis a pity you did not sooner publish this part of the Auchness specific. It would have saved much profitless discussion. It is by far the most vital element in your liberal covenant, and completes its perfect development. It happily explains and illustrates the Auchness balance-sheet. By this time the proprietors of the kingdom will understand the pleasant position in which you are to put them. With the right of hypothec abrogated, a rotation of crops exploded, and their rent lowered until it meets the depreciated prices, and converts the tenant's loss into profit, they will fall into a very enviable predicament. I sympathise with the Free-trade lairds. Sad and dismal are their meditations, and deep and bitter their murmurs. They say they are betrayed, and that they have reared up and cherished an enemy in their camp.
There is another question, however, which your philosophy does not seem to embrace. You never seem to have inquired whether the immense reduction of rents which must take place to meet the present prices, (which are yet daily falling,) so as to convert the farmer's loss into a profit, is to be a national benefit. It is certain that the reduction of rent requisite to effect your avowed object, must infallibly effect a revolution in the structure of society, and entail upon our country a train of sufferings unheard of and unparalleled. It is most creditable to the discernment and patriotism of your brother farmers, that they reject, as a permanent cure for their difficulties, the lowering of rent, so as to turn their present loss into profit. They know that, over a large proportion of the arable soil of the kingdom, rent cannot so fall without being insufficient to meet the present burdens on land, and the great outlay required to maintain the farm-buildings, and to liquidate the other innumerable demands made on the proprietor of the soil. You call loudly for liberal covenants, for expensive buildings, and for more drainage, and at the very time you are depriving the proprietor of the means, and crippling him in his finances. Falling rents, farmers may well know, are the certain index of a retrograde agriculture; and, whatever you may fancy, you cannot reduce rent to the extent you have now pointed out, without inflicting misery, not only on the tenant-farmers and agricultural labourers, but sooner or later on every class in the community. The certain tendency of your agricultural speculation, and by no long circumduction, is to sink the agriculture of Britain to the condition of Irish husbandry, and to overrun the nation with pauperism. The landed interest will not suffer with impunity; and between it and the moneyed interest an internecine war will ensue. There is a set of pestilent demagogues and pretended patriots, flourishing at this moment in the kingdom, who are busy instilling into the masses the revolutionary idea that the landlord's rent is a robbery of the community, and that it may be dealt with as conveniency requires. In your latest essay you have pandered to this pernicious delusion. I do not blame you for so doing. I believe that you write in a childlike innocence, and with total blindness to the necessary consequences of your own doctrines.
I have been exceedingly edified and amused with the manner in which you have expounded the theory of rotation. "The slavish adoption of fixed rules of rotation are suited only to a comparatively low state of agriculture. Nature has no rotation of crops—the plant bursts from the earth, grows, bears its produce, and drops the matured seed to reproduce itselfbeside the root of the parent stem. The skilful gardener lays none of his land to rest in grass," (p. 17.) This may be fine writing, but it is unmitigated nonsense. Naturehasa rotation of crops; and from nature the agriculturist took the hint, and got his teaching. The distribution of that part of the indigenous flora of a country which constitutes its annuals, is ever liable to vary. Nature's annual weeds flourish for a while in the same spot; but, having exhausted the peculiar nutriment in the soil which sustained them, they degenerate and migrate to a fresh locality. The plants which the farmers grow are chiefly annuals. But, in fact, two crops of the same kind of wood on the same soil is not according to the arboriculture which nature teaches. "The plant bursts from the earth, grows, bears its produce, and drops the matured seed to reproduce itself." Well, and what then? Can the farmer take the lesson? Is it not with this very habit of nature that his art must wage an incessant warfare? The skilful gardener has a rotation of crops, although he grows none of the cereal tribes, which especially rejoice in the alternative system of husbandry; and if the skilful gardener does not lay down "his land to rest in grass," his costly substitute is to trench his plot every fourth or fifth year to the depth of three or four feet, and thus to invigorate the wearied soil, by amalgamating it with fresh mould. The exhausted surface, the Auchness experimenter is compelled to remove. It is not very accurate to speak of the farmer "laying his landto restin grass." He puts it under grass as an improving crop, and one which asystemof agriculture cannot dispense with—a crop, too, which in many situations yields a larger free profit than he could otherwise raise from the land.
I do not remember of ever meeting with more ignorance of botany, vegetable physiology, and horticulture, condensed into a shorter space than you have succeeded in cramming into the few sentences just quoted. But, in a brave contempt of what you had written, you tell us, on the very next page, that you "do not mean to say that the system of rotations has been without its use." And you add, that "the average agriculture of Scotland has undoubtedly been improved by it." And it is with such absurd and solemn see-saw that you enlighten the agricultural world. If a rotation of crops has improved the average agriculture of Scotland, that demonstrates the excellence and necessity of the system. It is average results that anything deserving the name of a system can alone secure. Agricultural reformer as you are, I would respectfully suggest that you must, if you wish to effect any good, legislate for an average measure of agricultural character and skill. The farmers of the kingdom are an immensely numerous body, and you cannot expect them to be all men of genius. Let your philanthropy prompt you to stoop for a time from your transcendental height, that you may minister to the wants of average humanity.
I am not surprised that you are angry with Peter Plough. This is very excusable. You had said in your first pamphlet, (p. 28,) that it was demonstrable that, if all the arable land in the same parish were cultivated as the Auchness farm was, immense benefits would accrue to the people. Mr Plough's expansive patriotism was not to be limited by the parochial boundaries, and he determined, if possible, to give the benefits of the system to the whole of the kingdom. With this view, he instituted an inquiry, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the Auchness system was capable of general adoption. Nothing could be more fair. You had, in fact, challenged the inquiry, by representing high farming as the substitute for Protection. Peter Plough, by a cogent and crushing demonstration, proved the utter inapplicability of the Auchness system for general adoption. He has impaled you on the horns of a dilemma, and no wonder that you are writhing in anguish. You try to smile, but, alas! it is too evident that your laugh is like that of the third ruffian in the melodrama, when the skeleton is discovered in the closet, and supplies the last link in the chain of circumstantial evidence. Manifestly the salt tears are seen to trickle over your abashed countenance.
Peter Plough understated his case. Include Ireland in his calculation, and adopt the more recent statistics of Porter, giving the increase in the mercantile navy, and Mr Plough's demonstration remains intact and impregnable. He had shown that, to apply the Auchness system to British husbandry, thirty-eight millions of additional capital would be required by British farmers, for the feeding stuffs and artificial manures; and he naturally asked where this "sum of money was to be got?" "And pray, good Peter, where is it to go?" you respond. Why, certainly, the first question in order of time and of prudence is, where is the money to be got?—unless, indeed, it be part of your system to make your money go before it be got! When you tell us that every ounce of the feeding stuffs used at Auchness was raised on British soil, you forget and misstate. The lintseed, (p. 21, first pamphlet,) and the oilcake, (p. 23, second pamphlet,) are not of British production. The bruised oats and bean meal for the cattle, and the supplemental quantity of oats for the servants and horses, may be indeed of British production—although not grown on the farm of Auchness. But how long, think you, are farmers to grow these grains at a loss, to benefit the Auchness factor? He is dependent upon others for his supplies of these feeding stuffs.
Peter Plough has, in fact, compelled you to eat your leek, for you now tell us that the high farming at Auchness is, "as an example, to be taken in the spirit more than in the letter." What! have you forgotten that you set it forth "as the Substitute for Protection?" and that, if your language had any meaning, you intimated that its virtue would be equipollent and co-extensive with that of the plundered crutch? And now, forsooth, you veer about, with slippery versatility, and tell us that you are to be "read in the spirit more than in the letter." When such grave interests are at stake, this seems to me intolerable trifling, although no doubt it provides a door of escape for you, whatever disaster may attend the adoption of your expedient. In every such case the model will have been copied with a servility too literal, or a liberality too latitudinarian; and there seems nothing for it but that the bewildered husbandman, before he embarks on the career of high farming, and runs the risk of mistaking the letter for the spirit, shall make a pilgrimage to Baldoon and consult the oracle, and ask the author to interpret his impenetrable text.
Whether it pleases you or not, this question must be agitated and tested, and sifted and probed to the very bottom—namely, Is the mode of farm management pursued by Mr M'Culloch upon Auchness capable of being adopted in the general cultivation of the land of the country? This is the only question at all interesting to the agriculturists of the kingdom—the only question at all germane to their present position. If this is not meant, your high farming is a childish bauble. Its value, not only as a substitute for Protection, but as an instructive lesson in husbandry, must be determined by a correct solution of the preceding query. We find, then, upon a farm of 260 acres, that crops 1848 and 1849 give an average extent of 81 acres under grain, 48 acres in grass, and 131 acres in green crops; and of the latter, 78½ acres are potatoes all to be sold off.
We also find that 130 cattle, and about 190 sheep, are annually fattened upon the farm. The large extent of the green crop, and the quantity of cattle fed, are the salient and prominent features of the system. This you admit, I am therefore taking you in the spirit more than in the letter. Is a system, embracing such a disproportion between its root and grain crops, adapted for extension? Try its effects upon a small scale—extend it over a district of the average extent of Scotch counties, and inquire what would be the result. You will find that there would be a produce of about 301,417 tons of potatoes, 114,845 fat cattle, and 167,788 sheep—a produce more than equivalent to supply every town in Scotland with potatoes and butcher meat. Or, to indulge your parochial partialities, let us inquire what would be the results ifone farminevery parishin the kingdom were farmed according to the Auchness fashion. In England, Wales, and Scotland, there are 11,583parishes. We would have of "edible roots"i. e.potatoes, 4,633,200 tons, after allowing an equal quantity to be destroyed by the rot, as apparently happened at Auchness last year. Of wheat, 2,782,816 qrs. Of fat cattle, 1,505,790. Of fat sheep, 2,409,264—and a snug little money profit from hoggets and cows, young horses and ewes, of some ten millions. A small model farm in each parish of the island can supply its present population with beef and potatoes, and leave of the latter a liberal supply to the Rector's "generous pigs." Double our population, and add another model farm to each parish, and the wants of "the million" are forthwith supplied. Avaunt Malthus! all hail, Caird! "A plethora of beef, a plethora of vegetables," you facetiously exclaim. You have not considered that there may be a plethora of food, with concomitant destitution, nay starvation, amongst the poor and unemployed. Read the Irish correspondence of theMorning Chronicle, and theClare Journalfor February, and you will find that the two things actually co-exist at this moment in some parts of Ireland. But the next inquiry is, Would there be a plethora of profit as well as of food? Would the balance-sheet do, and would "change the figure" not be the instant cry? Suppose the potato epidemic to pass away, or allow even the present supplies of that root and of butcher-meat from other sources to be continued, would potatoes bring 30s. per ton, and beef 4d. per lb? It is not in the least degree probable. Is it not certain, too, that there would be such a demand for foreign manures as would raise their price beyond the possibility of profitably using them?
But perhaps this is copying the model too servilely. Well, modify it to such an extent as to preserve in operation the leading principles of the system—which is based upon cattle-feeding and potato culture to an extent wholly out of proportion with the other products of the farm—and the system will still prove self-destructive, inasmuch as its tendency must be to increase the cost of production, and to lower the value of the produce raised. With regard to the cost of production, Table ii. in your "addition" (4th ed. p. 40,) enables us readily to test the question. It appears that Mr M'Culloch's "expenditure per acre for labour, artificial manures, purchased food, and expenses of management," exceeded the average expenditure of Messrs Watson, Dudgeon, and Christopher by £3, 11s. 7¾d. Now you tell us from Porter that, of garden and tillage lands in Great Britain, there are 13,637,320 acres. To bring up these—which, however, include Auchness—to the mark of the Auchness system at a farther expenditure of £3, 11s. 7¾d. per acre, an additional capital of £48,852,857, would be required by British farmers. And this is "High Farming farther illustrated!" and you correct Peter Plough by adding eleven millions to his estimate of the new capital required! I am here stealing a leaf from the book of Peter Plough; but, if you will not allow us to look at your case in this light, it is not worth a moment's notice. If the system cannot be reduced to practice, why tantalise the farmer by bringing the cup to his lips, but denying him the power of slaking his thirst?
You seem to think that you have communicated new and invaluable information to the practical farmer, and you "challenge Mr Stephens, within the whole compass of his two thousand pages of letterpress, to exhibit an instance equally instructive," (p. 27.) What is it that is so new? Is it the value of manure and its extensive application that constitutes the novelty, now for the first time made known? The ancient Romans anxiously collected their manure from as many sources as the moderns do. They liberally employed liquid manure and pigeons' droppings, (your guano,) then esteemed of inestimable value. Or, is it the stall-feeding system that you publish as something so new and instructive? Why, theMetayersof Lombardy have long fed their cattle in a somewhat similar fashion, but with more extraordinary care. They feed them in stalls—they bleed them—they brush them twice a-day, whether with "a dandy brush" or not is not recorded, and they rub them over with oil. The oleaginous application is something more exquisite than the Auchness system administers. There is, in truth, nothing new inwhat you have written, as every educated agriculturist knows; and you might have found your "instructive instances" almost in any history of agriculture in any one of our Cyclopedias. When I consider this, I have been forcibly reminded of the valorous exploits of the immortal hero of one of Sir Walter Scott's best poems, which the bard thus commemorates,—