THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Ex Libris SIR MICHAEL SADLER ACQUIRED 1948 WITH THE HELP OF ALUMNI OF THE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION 1 A* TALPA Chronicles of a Clay Farm. An Agricultural Fragment. AUTHOR OF ' INgUIRY INTO THE HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE ' ETC. ' ridentem dkere -verum <%uid -vetatf SIXTH EDITION. LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1865. LONDON PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. XEW-STBEET SQUAKE TO THE KEADEES AND CONTRIBUTORS OF THE 'GARDENERS' CHRONICLE AND AGRICULTURAL GAZETTE OF SOME SCATTERED ESSAYS OF PAST YEAES BASED ON THE HOPB AND BELIEF NOT UNCONFIBMED AT THEIR HANDS THAT AGBICULTUBAL THOUGHT MAY BE CANDID AND EVEN ' SPECULATIVE ' YET HUSBANDRY NOT THE LESS PRACTICAL IS FINALLY INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR Svolv poppy pia ' 629330 CONTENTS. [$ irst Strug.] I. PAGE THE WASTE 1 II. THE DEVIL-ON-THREE-STICKS 8 III. A PRACTICAL BEGINNING 13 IV. A CONVERT, AND A HERETIC 20 V. COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION 27 VI. CALX AND RECALCITRATION .36 VII. EARTH-STOPPING . . 42 VIII. ' TRUTH AT THE BOTTOM OF A 5 MARL-PIT . , . .49 IX. ' FALLOWS' AND WHAT FOLLOWS 58 x. THEORY AND PRACTICE . 67 DISSOLVING VIEWS 82 XII. A WORD AT PARTING 87 VI CONTENTS. [Sstonb Strug.] XIII. PAGE ' FARM TO LET' .99 XIY. AN ' APPLICATION' 110 XV. ' LANDLORD AND TENANT' . . . . . 120 XVI. LOW PRICES AND LONG FACES 129 XVII. A ' MATUTINAL HOUR ' 142 XVIII. ' TALPA LOQUITUR' 153 XIX. THE ' POWERS' THAT BE 167 XX. THE ' PLAIN ENGLISH' OF IT 180 XXI. THE STEAM-CULTIVATOR 195 XXII. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED 206 XXIII. MACHINERY OF THE CLAYS 223 XXIV. CONCLUSION ....... . 233 LIST OF VIGNETTES. BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK. PAGE A Sketch Introductory 7 ' Has it ever been tried with a Spirit-level ? ' . . .12 ' As the weakest link of a chain is the measure of its strength' 19 ' In spite of forty years' experience to the contrary ! ' .26 * Mingle, mingle, mingle, Ye that mingle may ! ' . . .35 ' A sort of jovial rebellion against the long despotism of Jack Frost' 41 ' Down went the Fences, notwithstanding ' . .48 ' The bright little sentinels of Heaven were taking one by one their watch-posts ' 57 < The Wizard of the Pacific' 66 1 I had the same profound respect for each and both' . 81 ' Eheu ! quantus equis, quantus erat viris Sudor!' 86 ' On through the silent night, While weary labourers sleep, still works, alone ' . 94 Vlii LIST OF VIGNETTES. PAGE ' I say, Mr. Bowles, have you seen this Farm that's adver- tised hereP' 109 ' but the mischief lies in the corollary, " so much for your Science !"' 119 ' In which there is at once Antagonism of interest yet Mutuality of object ' 128 ' All up with Farming, I doubt ! ' 341 ' Indicating that which was, and is no longer ' . .152 ' We shall learn of him another, and a greater lesson, some day' 166 ' It's his first year at plough: he was " kipping craows" for the last two or three ' 179 ' Steam-power, no more to do with the Plough than a Horse has to do with a Spade ' 194 ' The willing giant stands idly panting and smoking ' . 205 ' Vestigia nulla retrorsum' ...... 222 ' Incontinently bent on their baptism of native mud ' . 232 'The End' 244 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. [FIKST SEKIES.] I. THE WASTE. MUCH as may be learnt, by a willing mind, from the wisdom of others, the most practical, and (shame upon us !) the most attractive lessons seem always to be derived from their failures. It is too late, in the natural history of the e biped without feathers that laughs,' to stop and enquire into this little item from the list of his peculiarities ; so I shall take it for granted in the most practical and amiable way in which it can be at once assumed and applied ; and, like the self-devoted bird that plucks its own breast to feed the young brood, open up my early farming blunders to the instructive gaze of those young and ardent agriculturists who are just beginning to recog- nise the last of human Sciences in the first of human 2 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. Arts, and to ' only wish, like duteous sons, their parents were more wise.' I shall not tell when it was, nor where it was, nor why it was, that I first ' broke ground : ' the first would be too cruel, the second too particular, and the third too personal. But I shall describe my Farm geologically, and myself categorically, which must answer every proper enquiry of the curious, and will leave a little untold besides, the better to keep alive the interest of the narrative. Somewhere or other in England there is a flat bleak high-lying district, which a shallow or very terse geologist might haply describe as part of the New -red -sandstone formation ; but where, if he would take the trouble to plough an acre, he would hear now and then a suspicious kind of sound from the share and coulter, which I may describe by the word * soapy' ; and where, whenever the nose of the plough chanced to dive an inch deeper than usual, he would see certain blue-looking indications turned up that would rather startle his complacency, if a lover of light soils, by a suggestion of the proximity of that terrible antagonist the blue Lias. Should this discovery stimulate further exploration, and his plough be set a couple of inches deeper, his ears THE WASTE. 3 might presently be regaled with a sound as of a heavy-laden cart dragging over a newly-gravelled road, and after turning up a variety of conglome- rates, as compacted as the bed of an old Roman causeway, and as many-coloured as Harlequin's coat, the stress of the pull would suddenly be eased, and the plough be heard swimming whisperingly through a bed of wet sand ; and just as the filler-horse was congratulating himself that it was all plain sailing now, bang goes a trace or a spreader, and the plough comes to a standstill, just revealing, at the share- point, the bruised side of a quartz pebble as big as a foot-ball grinning at you from its tight nook in the bed of the furrow. Have I described enough ? or shall I add, to this subsoil sketch, a faint and feeble idea of the surface, some time about the month of February (surnamed * fill-dyke ' not without reason) ; and endeavour to paint the hopeless, currentless, resourceless, and pitiable condition of water, whose unhappy fate has fallen, or melted, upon fields as flat as a billiard- table, and without even a * pocket ' to run into for escape or concealment ? There it would stand, day after day, and week after week, and month after month, shining along the serpentine furrows, as if it B 2 4 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. never, never, never would go again ! And the only wonder was, when or how, or by what bold am- phibious being, the ridges had ever been raised, which it intersected, like a sample series of Dutch canals and embankments. This was my farm : 250 statute acres ! * Why did you take it ? ' I didn't. It took me. That ' mysterious lady' who is painted with a bandage on her eyes (she can see as well as you or I), made it, with a pat on the back, my property, and shortly afterwards, with a slap in the face, my ' occupation.' It had been per- forming for a series of years a sort of ( geometrical progression' downwards. Each incoming tenant took it at about half the previous rent; dabbled about for a year or two like a duck, and retired ' lame,'' It was but a simple equation a very simple one to say when the rent would come to zero. It looked on the Rental-book like an annual sum in Reduction; 'facilis descensus Averm,' literally translated into plain English. What was to be done with it? This brings me to my proposition No. 2 : which is in fact what is commonly called ' No. 1 '- myself. If there was in the catalogue of human pursuits, one which I hated and feared, dreaded and despised, didn't know and didn't wish to know THE WASTE. 5 it was that strange, incomprehensible, infatuated, damaging thing, which from my cradle upwards I had heard described and deprecated under the almost forbidden name of Farming. Dr. Johnson calls it the delight of destiny to counterchange the plans and purposes of man ; but some other wise man, I think it is Lord Bacon, tells us to ' choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.' But accident seems more potent than destiny, plan, purpose, choice, or habit On a long sea-voyage, and in a rather resourceless foreign land, a couple of unbidden companions had stuck by me with persecuting tenacity, and attracted first my acquaintance, then my intimacy, for sheer want of anything else : they were two books : to "\vit, Cobbett's edition of Tull's Works, and the Useful Knowledge Society's volumes on British Husbandry. I read them, and re-read them ; and then began again : for nine mortal months I was reduced to gorge my literary appetite upon these husks, as I at first regarded them. The Georgics of Virgil had begun and ended all my previous acquaintance with farming; they were the sole associating tie that con- nected me with this sudden and enforced onslaught upon the ' theory and practice of Agriculture ; ' and I returned to England poor wretch in worse 6 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. condition than I went, in fact, given up by the * Faculty ' as a confirmed Book-former. With this morbid predisposition upon me imagine me exposed unexpectedly to the fatal at- mosphere of a sick-room in which lay a dying man, as he devoutly believed, a land-steward stricken with influenza, caught upon my marsh : imagine the reports, the lectures, the deathbed warnings I had to sit and listen to, about this blessed farm ! He described it as you would a pestilence ; a terror to all around it ; it must be cured, not for its own sake, but as you would treat a rotten sheep, or a truss of mouldy hay. It was painful, yet ludicrous, to hear him, for he talked like a dying man of a bad child that would 'be sure to come to harm some day or other.' What on earth was to be done ? Agriculture was not royal then there was no ' Society's Journal,' no motto-laden buttons publishing the banns (for the first time) of ( PRACTICE with Science,' no dear little weekly bonnebouche of a Gazette, no July gathering of fat cattle and great men to look back- ward and forward to, during the other months. All was dull, blank, and cheerless, not to say * flat and unprofitable.' What was to be done ? apostatise from all the pro- THE WASTE. 7 mises and vows made from my youth up, and take it in hand that is, in a bailiff's hand, which certain foregone experiences had led me to conceive was of all things in the world the most out of hand, if that may be called so which empties the hand and the pocket too ! Such seemed the only alternative : at first it was an impossibility then an improbability, and then as the ear of bearded corn wins its forbidden way up the schoolboy's sleeve, and gains a point in advance by every effort to stop or expel it, sc did every determination, every reflection coun- teract the very purpose it was summoned to oppose ; and, in short, one fine morning I almost jumped a yard backward at seeing my own name on a wagon ! A Sketch introductory. II. THE ' DEVIL-ON- THREE-STICKS: THERE is an old saying that ( Fools build Houses for wise men to live in,' a proverb which, whether applicable or not to Farms as well as houses, pro- bably receives about as fair an average of cErect verification in the course of each man's individual experience, as any other of those mysterious morsels of traditional truth which are handed down from each generation to its successor, like faery money, Crold in the giver's, Dust in the receiver's hand. The young experimentalist in brick-and-mortar, with a shake of the head not unworthy of the Elizabethan statesman whose posthumous fame has owed so frmch to that outward symptom of plethoric wisdom, admits the general and antecedent truth of the motto which might be scrolled up over so many a splendid door- way ; he does not doubt or deny it, not he ! il is not to disprove its general, but to parry its par application that he purposes : it is not to inv icular lidate THE * DEVIL-ON-THREE-STICKS.' 9 the truth of the rule as against man, but to prove it by an exception, in the case of one individual of the species that he knows of. And the clear rectangular pencil-work and the softening shades of the brush of the accomplished artist-architect do their work upon his eyes, like Vanity reflected in a mirror, as he beholds (on pasteboard) the * Splendid Elevation,' and then reads with delight in one corner of the sketch, the ( exceedingly moderate Estimate." 1 Such is ' the taper that has lighted fools,' each on his solitary track, out of the beaten high-road of old Experience, leading them on by the marsh-light hope of individual exemption from the Common Lot. And old men shake their heads, and only smile at the sallies of youthful arrogance that rise and break in succession upon the shore of life, and need no reproach but that which their own sure ebb will bring with it. And so they felt, and so they looked on me, in the autumn of - - no, I dare not say how long ago ! when the arrival of load after load of Drain- ing-tiles gave parish notice of the attempt to drain what Antiquity had pronounced undrainable, since the Deluge. But why can't it be drained ? asked Greenhorns. Because there's no Fall! replied collective Wisdom. 10 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. Has it ever been tried with a Spirit-level ? Now this was not a fair question. Spirit-levels (if they had any meaning or existence at all) were unintelligible mathematical-looking instruments of purely professional nature, only seen (if ever) in the hands of road-surveyors' assistants, and people of that sort. They had nothing whatever to do with farming. The question was unfair : it contained an ambiguous term. Picture to yourself, however, the following con- clusion from it. A bleak, foggy November day: a long rambling space, marsh or meadow, as you might choose to call it, of some twenty acres in extent, and about the third part of a mile in length, with a narrow, thick plantation of rushes, sedges, and brooklime, and such aquatic vegetation, thread- ing its way in one long dank line from end to end, by such fantastic wanderings, that it looked as if the hidden channel of choked moisture it concealed had been making a continued series of experiments from time out of mind in search of an outlet ; and, after centuries of struggle and disappointment, had at length arrived, quite by accident, at a certain point of the meadow, where you might see a pair of high mud-boots standing, or rather soaking, with a man in them, peering through a telescope on three legs, THE ' DEVIL-ON-THREE-STICKS.' 11 as if he was watching for the total eclipse of a small boy that is to be seen gradually sinking about fifty yards off, and clutching in his agony a tall staff by his side, figured as if for high and low water mark. Presently the Boots and the Telescope, after various ineffectual efforts and heavings, succeed in striking their quarters; the boy, after sundry spasmodic struggles, to correspond, achieves the same exploit ; and the same scene as before occurs again some fifty yards further on, and again, and again, at the same intervals, until they reach the other end of the meadow, and come plump upon the banks of a marshy Pool some six acres in extent. On attaining this point, the telescope is suddenly shut up with a triumphant snap ; its three legs jump into one ; the dripping shivering boy receives a tremendous involuntary thwack on the back, and A FALL OF NINE FEET is declared, like a * Divi- dend of ten per cent, and a Balance over to go on with!' Oh, you primeval Carp, Pike, and Eels ! you little thought on that day how deadly a fishing-rod, marked and measured inch by inch, threw its shadow across your ancient domain ; little did your believed secu- rity dream of so new a monster, the angler upon three 12 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. legs, that had measured the altitude of your down- fall, and caught you all, if not upon one, upon two cross hairs ! Old Fish or a New Farm? Snipes or Swede- turnips? Which was it to be? There stood but this question between the will and the way to let the Dry Land appear. And who knows what Saurian monstrosities of a primeval age might be brought into daylight when this stagnation of waters was let loose, which had dammed up the moisture of so many broad acres from time immemorial ? since, little raised above the high-water mark of this pool, lay the subsoil of the whole farm beyond and around it; and the lowest point of this meadow was the lowest point of all. 'Has it ever been tried with a Spirit-level?' III. A 'PRACTICAL' BEGINNING. IT was urged by Mr. Brunei, as a justification for more attention and expense in laying the rails of the Great Western than had been ever thought of upon previously-constructed lines, that all the embankments, and cuttings, and earth-works, and stations, and law and parliamentary expenses, in fact, the whole of the outlay encountered in the formation of a Railway, had for its main and ultimate object a perfectly smooth and level LINE OF RAIL ; that to turn stingy at this point, just when you had arrived at the great f ultimatissimum ' of the whole proceedings, viz. the Iron Wheel-track, was a sort of saving which evinced a want of per- ception of the true object of all the labour that had preceded it. It may seem curious to our expe- riences, in these days, that such a doctrine. could ever 14 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. have needed to be enforced by argument; yet no one will deem it wonderful who has personally wit- nessed the unaccountable and ever new difficulty of getting proper attention paid to the levelling of the bottom of a drain, and the laying of the tiles in that continuous line, where one single depression or irregularity, by collecting the water at that spot year after year, tends towards the eventual stoppage of the whole drain, through two distinct causes, the softening of the foundation underneath, and the deposit of soil inside the tile from the water collected at the spot, and standing there after the rest has run off. Every depression, however slight, is con- stantly doing this mischief in every drain where the fall is but trifling; and if to the two con- sequences above mentioned, we may add the de- composition of the tile itself by the action of water long stagnant within it, we may deduce that every tile-drain laid with these imperfections in the finishing of the bottom, has a tendency towards obliteration, out of all reasonable propor- tion with that of a well-burnt tile laid on a perfectly even inclination, which, humanly speaking, may be called a permanent thing. An open ditch cut by the most skilful workman, in the Summer, affords A 'PRACTICAL' BEGINNING. 15 the best illustration of this underground mischief. Nothing can look smoother and more even than the bottom, till that uncompromising test of accurate levels, the Water, makes its appearance : all on a sudden the whole scene is changed, the eye- accredited level vanishes as if some earthquake had taken place : here there is a gravelly Scour along: which the stream rushes in a thousand little O angry-looking ripples; there it hangs, and looks as dull and heavy as if it had given up running at all, as a useless waste of energy ; in another place, a few dead leaves or sticks, or a morsel of soil broken from the side, dams back the water for a considerable distance, occasioning a deposit of soil along the whole reach, greater in proportion to the quantity and the muddiness of the water detained. All this shows the paramount importance of perfect evenness in the bed on which the tiles are laid. The worst-laid tile is the measure of the goodness and permanence of the whole drain, just as the weakest link of a chain is the measure of its strength. But this, of course, was all theory ; and theory, of course, was all nonsense : my practical head-drainer was quite of a different way of thinking, as his modus operandi will exhibit. The morning after he 16 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. had commenced operations I found him hard at work cutting a drain about eighteen inches deep, laying in the tiles one by one, and filling in the earth over them as he went! The field I had begun upon was large, and very flat ; and in order to increase artificially the fall, I had calculated to make the drain eighteen inches deeper at the mouth than at the tail. I might as well have calculated for him the distance of a telescopic star. ' Pve been a-draaning this forty year and more / ought to know summut about it I ' Need I tell you who said this ? or give you the whole of the colloquy to which it furnished the epilogue ? I had begun, something in this way ' Why, my good friend ! what on earth are you about ? Didn't I tell you to lay the drain open from bottom to top, and that not a tile was to be put in till I had seen it, and tried the levels ? ' &c. &c. Old as Adam old as Adam was the whole dialogue it is idle to go through it Conceit versus Prejudice the ignorance of the young against the ignorance of the old the thing that has been, and will be, as long as * the sun and the moon endureth.' It ended as I have said. A ' PRACTICAL ' BEGINNING. 1 7 * I've been a-draining this forty year and more I ought to know summut about it ! ' Here was a staggerer. Amongst all my calcula- tions to think that I should never have calculated on this ! I had seen the commander of a noble steamer with one parenthetical point of his forefinger (caught in an instant by the helmsman) put about a ship of a couple of thousand tons burden; I had seen the practical astronomer, with an infinitesimal touch of the directing screw of the telescope, bend his search- ing gaze millions of millions of miles away from its first position ; I had seen the mill-owner, with half a nod to his foreman, stop in an instant the hurly-burly of a thousand wheels while he explained to me, in comparative quiet, some little matter of new inven- tion in the carding of the rough wool, or the round- ing and hardening of the finished Twist. I had seen enough of the empire of Mind over Matter in many forms and shapes, by sea and land, to make me the devoutest of believers in modern miracle. Under the quiet seductive brightness of the midnight lamp, I had revelled in the mysteries of Number and of Form ; and in the working realities of daylight I had seen and stood witness to the application of those apparent mysteries to the most beautifully simple c 18 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. processes in the production of ordinary and universal articles of human want. It had furnished me no new or difficult gratification to level and calculate to an inch the amount of Fall to be obtained upon a field, which without this precaution might indeed be called, as it had been called, undrain- able ; and here I was fairly planted, at the first onset. Every inch of depth was of real value at the mouth of so long a line of drain. ' Three feet deep at the outlet ' was the modest extent of my demand ; and there I stood, watching the tiles thrown in pele-mele to a depth of eighteen inches, which I was given to understand was about ' two feet,' with as cool an indifference to the other foot, as if Two and Three had been recently determined by the common assent of mankind to mean the same thing. ' But I must have it three feet deep ! ' * Oh, it's no use ; it'll never draan sa dip as that through this here clay ! ' * But I tell you it must be ! There can be no fall without it ! ' * Well, I've been a-draining this forty year, and I ought to know summut about it.' From that moment I date my experience in the A 'PRACTICAL' BEGINNING. 19 trials and troubles of farming : at that instant my eyes began to open to the true meaning of those ' practical difficulties ' which the uninitiated laugh at, because they have never encountered them ; and which the man of science despises who has said to steam, water, and machinery, ' Do this, and they do it,' but has never known what it is to try and guide out of the old track, a mind that has run in the same rut ' this forty year and more.' ' As the weakest Irak of a chain is the measure of its strength.' C 2 IV. A CONVERT, AND A HERETIC. WE have heard and a little oftener than is plea- sant of victories gained in the field and lost in the Cabinet. The civil war that has waged so long be- tween the partisans of the deep and of the shallow drain presents an experience the converse of this. Long after peace had been proclaimed upon paper, and most of the printed authorities had begun to pull together in favour of the deep drain I say most, for even to this day a parting shot is now and then heard for the old system ; long after the shal- low advocates had written themselves round to the other side, the battle was still waging fiercely out- of-doors. Truly may the Draining-tile be said to have * fought its way downwards inch by inch.' The benefit derived even from a drain eighteen or twenty inches deep under the furrow, which was still A CONVERT, AND A HERETIC. 21 retained, was so manifest and immediate, that the very improvement itself prevented further improve- ment. A man who had shallow-drained one field, and found that even this did good, imagined himself furnished with a practical argument against deep draining, though he had never tried it ; like those who condemn books they have never read, on the autho- rity of opposite-thinking Reviews which they have read. This was precisely the sort of reasoning that lay fast and strong in the skull of my old waster-drainer ; for master I saw he was determined to be. The evidence of a hundred Spirit-levels would have been no answer to ' forty years' experience ' in draining and ditching. Of this I was quite sure : so we were at a dead pass. One or the other must give way ' and be for ever fallen.' It was easy to wish him forty years' more experience elsewhere and ' good morning ' ; but this would be only cutting the knot, and probably entailing another in succession. Nee deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus ! He was a good workman, and his authority over his men not a thing that it would be wise to shake, even had that been possible. A thought occurred to me, a very bold thought, all things considered. I knew he hated the 22 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABM. sight of the Level that curious-looking thing on three sticks, worse than the old gentleman that walks upon two. What if I could reconcile these two great opposing authorities by one timely stroke make him Master-of-arts on the spot, before the eyes of all his men ? Shorter and less earned de- grees have been taken in the world. The opportu- nity was irresistible. I had it brought ; adjusted it ; and told him to look through it and give me his opinion of the Fall. If you ever saw a dog put his nose to a wasp's nest, you may form some idea of the mistrustful curiosity and hesitating aversion with which he brought his face into close contact with his arch-enemy. A long indescribable process ensued ; a most de- termined effort to close the left eye with the right hand then the right eye with the left hand then a dead stillness, and a long fumbling breathless view of the world turned upside down, and his men stand- ing on their heads for the first time, in spite of the forty years' experience to the contrary ; and then ' Well I don't know but what you're right, Sir : the Fall does want a leetle easing at the bottom ! ' The success was complete. In half an hour every tile was uncovered. The men worked as men work A CONVERT, AND A HERETIC. 23 who feel justly proud of their commander : he had arrived at the highest summit of his profession. He returned to them with double authority and import- ance ; and the drainage of my first field was soon accomplished : not as deeply indeed as we now call deeply ; but deep enough, after the ridges had been twice cast, to allow Exall and Andrews' subsoiler to follow the cross-ploughing a year afterwards, and break to pieces as obdurate a hearthpan as ever re- sisted the root of an oak. * After the ridges had been twice cast : ' how easy it looks in print ! What a pretty little Example-farm would England and what would not Ireland be, if the Press could thus cultivate and civilise ! if ploughs were printers' types, and fields were paper if bogs and fens and marshes could be drained like inkpots, and every drop that falls from Heaven from which there falls not one drop NO ! NOT ONE DROP too much or too little were apportioned to its proper place and task ! It falls upon its proper place, and under that place lies its task, would but Man believe and act upon the hint, and do his part, his gloriously privileged part, in carrying out, for his own benefit, the purposes of perfect Wisdom, the indications of an ever-suggestive Handy-work. 24 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FABM. ' After the ridges had been twice cast ! ' Why, those seven words that lie so smooth on paper, cost me three times seven months of single-handed fight- ing against the ' Experience ' of a whole neighbour- hood. No hawk in a rookery ever got better belea- guered. * One down ; t'other come on ! ' was the one perpetual motto of the daily tongue-task that awaited me, fresh and fresh on every side, whichever way 1 turned. My own working-bailiff (et Tu Brute ! ) headed the attack within the camp the traitor ! while a neighbouring clergyman led on the foe from without, evidently viewing the heresy in a serious light, and myself as a fit subject for an auto da fe. The conclusion of our last skirmish was too good to be lost to posterity. I entered it verbatim in my farm memoranda. Here it is. * But tell me in earnest. Don't you mean to ridge up that field again ? ' ' No!' ' What, you mean to lay it flat ? ' 'Yes!' 1 In the name of Goodness ! Why ? ' ' Because THE NAME OF GOODNESS made it so I ' If I had suddenly assumed some demoniacal A CONVERT, AND A HERETIC. 25 form, and then, leaving a train of smoke and brim- stone, vanished with a clap of thunder from before the eyes of my catechist, I do not think his face would have assumed a greater expression of re- sourceless and complete astonishment than followed this extraordinary announcement of the reason for a farming operation. Vainly had I attempted to ex- plain in former conversations that when a field is effectually drained, the furrows are -tnderground, three feet deep ; and that one of the great objects of breaking the subsoil is to enable the water to go where it was intended to go, DOWNWARDS ; that every unevenness of the surface was a source of deviation, and therefore of unequal distribution, of that rich food which falls from Heaven, Oxygen and Hydro- gen, commonly called WATER; that on the best land, farmed in the best way, furrows are avoided as a nuisance and a loss, except as a mark for measure- work ; and that the object of draining and subsoiling was as the object of all Art is to imitate NATURE in her most perfect examples. The paradox of yesterday is the truism of to-day. Gas-lamps light up towns and Great Westerns cross the Atlantic, though Davy laughed at the one and Lardner at the other. And the principle of the 26 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. Deep drain, which ten years ago the timid theorist dared not assert, for its wild and visionary seeming, is now the substance of the ' Report of a Com- mittee,' the last tautology of admitted facts that men endure, and having consigned to the charnel-house of the Blue Books, inscribe its epitaph in an Act of Parliament. 1 In spite of forty years' experience to the contrary V. COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. THERE are some incidental points of practice at- tendant upon the drainage of a field, which give very little uneasiness to a beginner, but which, like many of the other realities of life, gain force with further experience. A blessed thing in its way is the untamed boldness of Youth. It gets done many things in this cautious calculating old world, Avhich if not done then, would never be done at all, and which, whether useful for their striking goodness, or for their striking badness, afford equally profitable employment to that large and self-respected portion of the community whose business and pleasure lie in contentedly criticising the errors that others have made, in the charitable spirit of ' The fiend who never spoke before, But cries, " I warn'd you ! " when the deed is o'er.' 28 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. One of the points referred to, first presented itself to the notice of the Chronicler, in this wise : ' A queer lot this, Sir ! ' ' Well, it is queer] replied I, as the drainer threw out first 'a lump of blue clay, then a lump of red, then a horrible spadeful of white, then a dripping mass of yellow sand, then a kind of grey gravelly conglomerate, that had puzzled the very pickaxe whose delicate style of dissection had been brought to bear upon it, then a few spadefuls of beautifully- veined red marl, and then broke into a carboniferous- looking bed of black peat, and then but let the old drainer christen it, for my heterology is exhausted. ( A QUEER LOT, this, Sir ! What shall I do with it ? ' I stood for a moment dramatically silent, working up my courage to a great effort. Out it came at last. * Let it be spread over the land I ' He was just raising his face to look up in mine. I knew what was coming ; I caught one sight of his mouth screwing into an agony of contortion, as the idea loomed painfully, by degrees, upon his per- ceptions. I waited for no more, but turned quietly round, trying to stifle a fit of inward laughter not at my own words, but at the effect I knew they were COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 29 producing ; and walked away. I turned once only, and saw him leaning on his spade, and looking after me. I can give you his soliloquy, for it was written upon his attitude, like the lettering of a picture. ' Well ! If that don't beat everything ! ' A blessed thing, in its way, I say again, is the untamed boldness of youth. There was not a full- grown ' practical farmer ' within a ten-mile circuit of the spot where the old drainer stood on that day rapt in severe amazement, who would not have thought it as much as his fair fame was worth to give that order. Nothing but the inconceivable daring of pure unmitigated THEORY would have ventured its character upon such a throw. Now for the explana- tion. Upon all wet thin cold clay soils, the wisdom of antiquity has long established that you are only to plough three or four inches deep ; that you are to ridge up your lands into a certain round-backed shape which the rain may run oif, as it would from an umbrella, or the roof of a house ; that you are never to cross-plough, or otherwise disturb this con- secrated form into which the earth's surface has been once-for-all moulded, but to keep scratching it, up and down, shallow enough to insure a seed-time by 30 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. having a dry surface two inches deep, leaving the furrow, and about a yard on each side of it, as the perpetual channel or bed for water or ice in the win- ter, and baked sterility in the summer ; that if any- body dares to mention to you anything about that mysterious abomination called THE SUBSOIL, you are to screw up your mouth, shake your head, and say ' It won't do to bring up that nasty stuff! ' * But don't Gardeners do it sometimes ? ' I one day ventured to ask with child-like simplicity, in reply to the established doctrine. ' That's a different thing ; Gardeners aren't " prac- tical farmers." ' ' But don't THE ROOTS OF PLANTS GROW DOWN- WARDS in a Field, as well as in a Garden ? ' I don't know how it was, but that provoking ques- tion always brought the conversation to an abrupt close. I never could get beyond it. It stuck in my throat and everybody's else, like Macbeth's Amen. Left alone at last to my own ignorance, I dropped deeper and deeper, day after day, into a state of con- firmed Theory. I got strange notions into my head, that, as two negatives make an affirmative, perhaps two bad soils might make one good one, and three COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 31 bad soils a better still, and four bad ones the best of all ! and when I saw the old drainer throwing out those lumps of many-coloured Clay, and Sand, and Gravel, and Peat, it was really too much for me. The monomania was irresistible : and the old fellow must have known it ; for at the very moment w^hen the paroxysm was at its height just when the extravagant thought was flashing across me that though everybody declared nem. con. that it was bad, SOME ONE had pronounced it GOOD just at that very moment of weak hallucination, the old Lucifer, smacking his lips in an odd way of his own, looked up temptingly in my face, with his question, ' A queer lot, Sir ! What shall I do with it ? ' Blue and red, yellow and grey, white and black, stiff and loose, gritty and waxy, cohesive and repel- lent, soft and hard there it lay before my eyes, my precious subsoil, in all its Protean variety of colour, texture, and consistency ; there lay the rascally substratum that had pulled down strong men one after another who had tried to grow crops over it, exposed at last and brought to daylight like an unearthed fox ; there it lay, dripping away its long pent-up moisture down the narrow channel that led to the newly opened outlet, through that 32 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. same long meadow aforetime celebrated in this Chronicle ; reminding one of a fallen foe bleeding out life and mischief at last and for ever. The impulse of pent-up theory was irresistible. ' Let it be spread over the land ! ' And so it was. And a very curious-looking field it made for the livelong winter that ensued. Wise men came from all the quarters of the compass to look at it. Some of their remarks and questions were very nattering. ' Where had I purchased my Winter top-dressing ? as they should like to buy some at the same shop, whatever the cost.' * What winter crop was I growing so carefully under the variegated carpet ? ' Toall which I answered with becoming gravity, and modesty of my own merit. Some of the remarks being of a more mysterious character, I entered in my Farm Journal for future explanation and experience : such for instance as that of an old gentleman who, shutting one eye (I suppose it was a habit), told me with great blandness of manner, that I had ' put my foot in it? (What could he mean ?) Another was so full of general good wishes that he ' wished I might get it ' more than once ; which I thought all the more good- natured as he did not even stay to particularise what COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 33 crop he meant, or how much per acre. But of course I civilly f wished him the same,' gently shutting one eye, as I saw it was the fashion, and had such a pleasing effect : at which, being an old friend, he performed the ceremony of inserting his second finger between the fourth and fifth rib of my left side, and informed me with a smile that * he saw I understood chaff ',' to which innocently replying in the affirmative, I added, for reason, that I had a great demand for it of late amongst my friends, and found it very useful in farming. Such are the dark and recondite passages presented by my jour- nal of that winter, which I offer for the information and guidance of those who may purpose trying novel experiments unsanctioned by the established practice of their respective neighbourhoods ; merely noting that there are some things besides the soil, on this earth, which require a little tempering, and pay well to a man's peace of mind for being done quietly and neatly, without haste or heat, yet smartly withal. Spring came at last : beautiful Spring ! that fills the old heart with youth, and softens down to a more genial and hopeful tone the frosts and snows that reign within, as without, through dreary winter. 34 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. Certain reports respecting the field that had been drained, and so curiously 'top-dressed,' had from time to time changed the current of opinion which had hitherto run so strongly all one way. The under- wagoner had told somebody (in strict confidence) that the snow had disappeared on that field two days sooner than from any other. This had been repeated in equal confidence from mouth to mouth, with the addition that all the clay had ' kicked down to ashes ;' but what topped everything was that before even Bean-sowing had begun, the * Motley close ' (so it has, ever since, been called) was reported ' as dry as a bone ! ' The Harrow is certainly not the most ingenious or perfect of agricultural implements ; but never was a more surprising feat performed by any, than was witnessed one fine morning early in March, when it was ordered over the field aforementioned ! Down went the clay, sand, peat, and everything else, ' Black spirits and white, Blue spirits and grey, Mingle, mingle, mingle, Ye that mingle may ! ' And * mingle ' in truth they did, into as free healthy- looking a soil, as fresh and as mellow as if it had COMBINATION AND COMMINUTION. 35 never lain underground or been out of the sunshine. With every turn of the horses, better and better it looked and worked. An increasing elasticity of movement seemed to pervade men, horses, harrows, soil, and even the very atmosphere of the field. Before the Work was half done, THEORY and The Chronicle were at a premium. ' Mingle, mingle, mingle, Ye that mingle may !' n 2 VI. 'CALX' AND RECALCITEATION. A LONG long time what a dreary time is Win- ter ! Well may all Christendom have lent its com- fortable efforts. through ages past, with a long and a strong pull and a pull all together, to give a point and a zest, and a time of almost legislative conviviality, in the Christmas fire-side and good fellowship, by way of in-door barricade, a sort of jovial rebellion, against the long despotism of Jack Frost ! It is hard to convey an adequate idea of the bounding pleasure with which after watching, month after month unchanged, the rugged uncouth results of that novel piece of Autumn workmanship lately described I saw at last the wholesome-looking combination of such a heterogeneous variety of earths that had lain icebound, as if for perpetual and stereotyped ugli- ness, now melting down under the genial influences of Spring, and that blessed pair of harrows, into what old Evelyn must have especially had in his eye when he talked of * a roscid and fertile mould.' ' Easy work it is to preach about farming ex- 'CALX' AND RECALCITRATION. 37 periments/ thought I to myself, as I wandered, in the gloomy evenings of December and January, amongst the square clods that lay exhumed upon the surface of the field, with the spade-mark inscribed in frozen obduracy upon their sides, like the blocks in the quarries of Syracuse dated with the tool- marks of twenty centuries ago ! ' Easy work to preach experiments, that take a year to make, and another to judge of, and another, and perhaps another still, to see the whole result of, to men whose " threescore years and ten " were hardly a sufficient Lease in which to scrape together a dozen facts beyond what their fathers knew ! ' A pretty homily upon LEASES there lies in these clods that have been keeping sentry here these three months, while the Manufacturer has worn a steam-engine from new to old, and the Trader has turned over half his capital, and briskly put in a fresh stock of ' Spring Fashions.' In the name of Common Sense, that useful ' raw material ' which England has as plentiful as Coal and Iron, what dead carcase has been chained to this living Art of Arts to clog its progress and to rot its vital powers, by adding the curse of INSECURITY of TENURE to its already arduous and time-and-patience-needing problems ! If it be Mind that acts upon Matter, what is it that 38 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. acts upon Mind? Surely MOTIVE and INTEREST, and that ASSURANCE OF RESULTS, which the most ordinary prudence demands, and the most buoyant energy feeds upon or dies. Well may a bold experiment startle minds which have been drilled into the habit, because into the necessity, of contracting every prospect, every out- lay, every mental conception, within the compass of an ' Agreement for a year ! ' If there is an attribute which more than others marks the distinc- tion of the human mind from that of the lower animal creation, it is that it looks forward : if there is an art that more than others demands the powerful and prolonged exercise of this faculty, it is agricul- ture : if there is a thing which adds force and method and precision to this faculty, it is Edu- cation. Does the pen need to draw the conclusion ? Can the reader of ' Sermons in Stones ' decipher no Leases in Clods, no Schools of practical instruction in ' Calx, Silex, and Alumen ? ' Winter, however, like Adversity, has a sur- prisingly improving influence upon - - things made of Clay. As each little thaAv, towards spring-time, came and went, the gradual process of granulation had broken down the once wet and reeking spadefuls into the form of dry loose Mole- 'CALX' AND RECALCITRATION. 39 heaps. As the tines of the harrow jumped and danced freely through the mingling mass, what a changed appearance was left behind! a dry rich earthy scent, sweeter than the breath of an Orange- grove, or the evening incense of the hay-field, rose gratefully up to meet the fresh morning beams that shot their influence for the first time on the new face of an old field ; the busy gossamer drew its glittering net-work from point to point in a thousand geome- trical forms over the levelled surface. * Well ! I never thought to see it look like this ! I should think anything 'ud grow here ! ' Such was the remark I overheard. I suppose it came from one of the horses ; they were the only living things present that were not pledged to an opposite opinion. The observation, however, if ill- fitting, was not ill-timed : it chimed in with the thoughts that were tumbling over each other in theoretical confusion through the brain of the incur- able Chronicler. What would have been thought of him had he dared to utter them aloud, as they came and went in this strange fashion ' The PROTOXIDE into the PEROXIDE ! ha ! a 'beautiful change that. Clay, Sand, Peat, and ' Marl too ! a goodly compound. How is it that a * sort of instinct seems to anticipate the conclusions 40 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. * of Science that the mind outstrips the page, and 'one's assent to each proposition seems paid in ' advance, before it falls strictly due ? Is science * intuitive ? then why is it MODERN ? Why have ' centuries upon centuries sixty centuries passed, ' and none till NOW ? Why NOW ? Could Liebig ' answer that ? I'm afraid even his " Quantitative ' Analysis," his grand discovery (for so it almost 'seems) of the magic residing in those words, ' " Numero, Pondere, et Mensura" would be baffled ' to resolve that problem. ' This field for instance ! they never thought to see ( it look like this : now, could they answer the 'question What does it yet want? Yes! the ' instantaneous reply would be LIME. " Why ? " ' inquires Theory ; " Because it would sweeten it " ' would be the answer. But WHY ? Theory again ' asks. Practice is silent. What ? silent, after ' sixty centuries of " Experience ! " Can nobody ' give us an answer the truth, and the whole truth ' of the operation of Lime upon soils ? ' The Chemist attempts an explanation. ' Its effect arises from its avidity for combination ; ' it searches out free acids, as a ferret does a rat, and ' instantly closes with them. Sulphuric, phosphoric, ' silicic, nitric, humic, and last not least, the " Great ' CALX ' AND RECALCITRATION. 41 ' Dissolver," CARBONIC acid : all these it makes ' known, by seizing upon them and becoming their ' base ; thus disintegrating as it were, and recon- ' structing the elements of the soil, and exciting to ' a new action the sluggards of Nature wherever ' they are lurking. It is the Composer and the De- ' composer, for nature cannot suffer either process, ' but fertility must follow : re-composition (growth) ' has begun ere decomposition is over : does a latent ' atom of organic matter stand inert for one instant ? * it is at him, like a Policeman, " Come, kip * moovin ! " But is this all ? is this half? Well may the ' Incoming Tenant ' ask ' How far is it to the Lime-kiln ? ' ' A sort of jovial rebellion against the long despotism of Jack Frost. VII. ' EARTH '-STOPPING. AMONGST the various changes upon the aspect of a Farm necessitated by modern practice, there is none which causes a greater degree of consternation in the immediate vicinity than the removal of the Hedgerows. There is a kind of time-honoured recognition and respect accorded to these huge ' mounds ' four or five feet high, and broad in pro- portion, with the running accompaniment of jungle sprawling at its pleasure in the plough-land along- side, which it goes to the very heart of the labourers themselves to desecrate, or reduce to the regulation- standard. It is all very well under the glowing candle-light, with the map of your farm spread out before you, and its hedgerows reduced to mere lines of sepia or lamp-black, to cut and carve, at your will, ten or twelve large square comely-looking fields out of thirty or forty unaccountably-shaped rhomboids undreamt of in the hardest book of * EARTH '-STOPPING. 43 Euclid, and then to go and dream the realization of your symmetrical example-farm, the wonder and delight of ardent agriculturists : but what a change comes over the spirit of the dream, when you mizzle out o' doors in the foggy November morning, and come to a dead stand-still at the tangled side of a fence (Bless me ! why it looked nothing on paper /) which has furnished the talk of many a Hunt-dinner for some centuries past, for the splendid leaps and the splendid * purls ' it has given rise or given fall to. Its height its enormous width its insur- mountable impracticable look altogether, require an eye quite as steady and a heart quite as firm as the hunter's, to take it. It seemed like sacrilege, indeed I felt self- convicted, at the first daring onslaught upon these giants of the olden time. I was obliged to ' take a run at it ' mentally, as it were, as many a man and horse had before done bodily and in the flesh ; and stuff my ears against the covered reproaches of the workmen. ' Famous bank for rabbits, this here, sir ? I've know'd twenty couple killed in a day out of it, in my time, when Squire ' * Ah ! well never mind ' quoth I, sorely and 44 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. interruptingly : * but what's that what have you got there ? ' ( This, sir ? Lor' blesh ye ! this is the earth where that ould vixen lived as gave you such a run last winter: I've know'd a litter o' seven whelps reared in this hole, an' heerd 'em a yelp- ing an' howling o' the summer evenings as if the' wondered when upon airth cub 'unting 'ould begin ! ' This was the climax, usually. No martyr ever suffered more than I used to carry home to breakfast imo sub pectore, by way of travesty to my over-night's imaginative enjoyment at the paper- prospect of large enclosures and unimpeded plough- shares. But the day of compensation came at last ; and with it came my first discovery of the extra- ordinary sheep-sightedness of spade-and-mattock- wielding humanity. Not till the fence was clear away, bank, thorns, pollards, ash-trees, rabbit-holes, fox-earths, and all, did I ever hear the exclamation * Well ! this is a wonderful alteration, to be sure ; why, I never thought to see it look in this way ! It's quite a beautiful field now ! ' ' One cheer for THE MAP after all ! ' quoth I to myself, as a1^ next candle-light down I sat again * EABTIl'-STOPPING. 45 over the bird?s-eye view of acres which I now began to find were trodden by bipeds and qua- drupeds with about equal perception of their plan and bearing. Who would be without an accurate Map of his farm, who once knew the cumulative triumphs that it brings of skill and head-craft, as lavishly accorded in the end, as denied in the outset, by the gregarious juries who sit in judgment on his acts? Down went fence after fence ! each with pre- cisely the same prologue and epilogue of blame and praise: for, all the successful issues in the world never stop or stay that rampant ' inconvertible ' thing, criticism ; that battery of pop-guns that is never silenced or taken by assault. Down, however, went the fences notwithstanding : and certainly, without reference to any of the more subterraneous improvements of drainage, cultivation, or otherwise, the mere accession of business-like appearance to the farm, when denuded of its miles of jungle, was, as Dame Quickly says, rawy ^-cultivation is utterly abandoned, no effective progress will be made in the application of Steam to the tilling of the earth. I repeat that " ploughing " is a mere contrivance for applying animal power to tillage. Get out of animal power and you leave " ploughing " behind altogether. Get into steam- power, and you have no more to do with the plough, than a Horse has to do with a spade. It is no essen- tial whatever of cultivation that it should be done by the traction of the implement. Spade-work is perpen- dicular. Horse-work is horizontal. Machine-work is rotatory. 1 Who would noAv dream of retaining the form of the Flail in the Threshing-machine, or that of the Oar in a Steam-ship, or of putting the Piston-rod to work at the end of a Pump-handle ? Yet doubt- less these piebald attempts were all made in their THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH' OF IT. 185 day, till the several inventors had come to see in turn that " Tis gude to be off with the old love Before ye be on wi' the new ! " * But no one can imagine, without trying it, the difficulty of making the mechanical part of the question intelligible to the agriculturist, and the agricultural part to the machinist. The steam-engine has no taste whatever for straight draught. He is a revolutionist, in the most exact sense of the word. He works by revolution : and by revolution only will he cut up the soil into a seed-bed, of the pattern required, be it coarse or fine. And that, it is my firm belief, he will be seen doing at a handsome average, before a very large portion of another century shall have passed over. Why should it not be ? Why should not a strip or layer of earth be cut up into fine soil at one operation (and sown and harrowed in, too), as easily as a circular saw cuts a plank into saw -dust ? But when you come to employing a Steam-engine to turn a Drum, to wind a Rope, to drag a Plough, to turn up a Furrow, 186 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. and all this as a mere prelude for an after-amusement to all the ancient tribe of harrows, scufflers, rollers, and clod-crushers, to do supplementally the real work of cultivation, it reminds one of " the house that JACK built." One can hardly blame the iron ribs of any respectable boiler for bursting at the first trial, in a task so utterly at variance with every known law of mechanical progress, so repugnant to the economics, I had almost said the very ethics, of the steam-engine. * I trust to be some day forgiven for so boldly speaking; but I am sorry to think of one useful shilling being thrown away in the attempt, unpro- fitable even if successful, of harnessing steam with horse harness, to do horse's work in a horse's way ; the implement itself, whose wretched work (on clay soil) it is set to accomplish, being a tool with sen- tence of death written upon it, be it as ancient as it may, for its tyranny to the subsoil, which bears the whole burthen and injury of its laborious path. ' I say the Plough is essentially imperfect. What it does is little towards the work of cultivation ; but that little is tainted by a radical imperfection damage to the subsoil, which is pressed and hardened by the share, in an exact ratio with the weight of THE PLAIN * ENGLISH' OF IT. 187 soil lifted, plus that of the force required to effect the cleavage. Were there no other reason for saying it than this, this alone would entitle the philosophic machinist to say, and see, that the plough was never meant to be immortal. The mere invention of the subsoiler is a standing commentary on the mischief done by the plough. * Why then should we struggle for its survival under the new dynasty of Steam ? The true object is not to perpetuate, but as soon as possible to get rid of it. Why poke an instrument seven or eight inches under the clod, to tear it up in the mass by main force, for other instruments to act upon, toiling and treading it down again, in ponderous attempts at cultivation wholesale, when by simple abrasion of the surface by a revolving toothed instrument, with a span as broad as the hay-tedding machine or CROSSKILL'S clod-crusher, you can perform the complete work of comminution in the most light, compendious, and perfect detail ? ' Imagine such an instrument (not rolling on the ground, but) performing independent revolutions be- hind its locomotive, cutting its way down by surface abrasion, into a semicircular trench about a foot and a half wide, throwing back the pulverised soil (as it 188 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FAEM. flies back from the feet of a dog scratching at a rabbit-hole): then imagine the locomotive moving forward on the hard ground with a slow and equable mechanical motion, the revolver behind, with its cutting-points (case-hardened) playing upon the edge or land-side of the trench as it advances, and capable of any adjustment to coarse or fine cutting; moving always forward, and leaving behind, granulated and inverted by its revolving action, a seed-bed seven or eight- inches deep, never to be gone over again by any after-implement except the drill, which had much better follow at once, attached behind with a light brush-harrow to cover the seed. 'It is hard, by mere language and without a diagram, to describe intelligibly to the mind's eye an instrument that has not been seen ; familiar as it has become to my own. My notion may be wrong, but I am strongly induced to feel that such an instru- ment alone will ever fulfil the requisitions of the steam-engine, which shortens and remodels every labour it undertakes, and never condescends to old appliances, except where they are themselves in- trinsically perfect in their mode of action. ' Why did Steam reject the Pump-handle and the Oar ? Because, in both, the leverage is obtained by THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH' OF IT. 189 loss of labour and time, occurring during the back- movement necessary to the manual, but not to the mechanical agent. For the same reason, whenever it is applied to till the earth, it will antiquate every instrument that cultivates by traction, because traction is not only not necessary to cultivation, but is in- herently mischievous on other grounds, apart from the clumsiness, inaccuracy, and incompletness of the work it turns out. * But THE STONES ! There is much fear expressed for the teeth of the circular- cutting implement I have described, when they come in contact with stones. The objection would have been equally valid, at first sight, against the use of the Plough or the Scuffler. Let me see the instrument in use where there are no stones (and there are plenty of broad acres in Eng- land of this class), and it will not be long before it gets upon the others. If it cost five pounds an acre to clear them out, it must be done, and would, in such case, pay well to do it. But the truth is, that the instrument itself suggests the kind of machine which, with a little adaptation (greater power and slower motion), might perform this preliminary service at the least expense. If land is to be like a garden in one respect, I see no good reason why it should not 190 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. in all. I do not think stones will stand long in the way of Steam, or be readily preferred to bread, if, where there happens to be none, the steam-driven cultivator can be brought to bear, which, after the simple and beautiful example of the mole, shall play out the long comedy of our present field cultivation in a single act, present a finely-granulated seed-bed by a single process, almost at the hour required, and trammel up the " long summer fallow " into the labour of a day, with an accuracy as perfect as the turning of a Lathe, and an aeration (and consequent oxygen- ation) of the soil as diffusive and minute as that of a scattered mole-heap, or the dust flying from a circular-saw bench. * Implement-makers and mechanicians would not be long in understanding all this, if they were not under the supposition, received at second-hand by them, and therefore the more difficult to eradicate, that ploughing is a necessary form of cultivation to be kept in view. Once let the Q.E.F. be clearly understood by them once let them be made fully to perceive that " ploughing " is merely the first of a long series of means towards the accomplishment of a particular end, that end being the production of a seed-bed, of suitable depth and texture, and with the soil as THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH' OF IT. 191 nearly as possible inverted in its bed and I do not think they will be long in setting the steam-engine about its proper task, in the proper way. But their attention is distracted, at present, from the end to the means. They are taught to think that the plough is a sine qua non that steam cultivation of necessity implies steam-ploughing, and they are led to give up the task in despair, because they are at fault upon a false scent. ' We have many rolling implements employed in the field, but we have only one instance of a revolv- ing implement. The clod-crusher and the Norwegian- harrow roll ; the hay-tedding machine (one of the best instruments ever invented) revolves. I use the words somewhat arbitrarily, but the difference I allude to is very important. The first are liable to the evil of " clogging ; " because they derive their axis-motion from the soil as they pass over and press upon it. This action must not be confounded with that of a machine which has its cause of revolution within itself, independent, and acting upon the soil as a circular saw acts upon a board, or the paddle- wheel of a steamer upon the water. The teeth of a saw clear themselves, by the centrifugal motion they communicate to the particles they have detached from 192 CHRONICLES OP A CLAY FARM. the substance they act upon. A circular " cultivator " steam-driven will do the same. It does so more effectually according to the velocity of revolution and the state of the soil. This last incident is as it should be ; for it is not desirable that a clay soil should be dealt with when not in a proper state for tillage ; and one great advantage of such an instru- ment as I point to would be that it would so immensely enlarge the choice of period, by its compendious accomplishment of the whole work of culture. * My object, however, is not so much to advocate the particular mode of applying Steam-power which I myself suggest, as to explain the grounds on which I feel more and more strongly assured that the at- tempt to employ it through the medium of the plough must be eventually renounced.' * There's one thing,' said Mr. Greening, who had been listening throughout with unusual attention and perseverance, and nodding knowingly at the end of each sentence, as if the idea was steadily gaining ground upon his mind, ' There's one thing that you haven't mentioned, and on your own side of the matter, too. The finer the soil's worked down, the greater the effect of the manure : of that THE PLAIN 'ENGLISH' OF IT. 193 I'm certain sure ; large as I like to see the clods on a fallow.' * I was afraid you would have taken the other side of the question on that point,' said I, ' on which a good objection may be taken, and answered, too ; and which we must not omit : but it was not because I had said my say out, that I came to a pause ; but rather because I felt that there was still so much un- said, and I am too tired to say it now, and you to listen to it, I should think. Come, it's no use deny- ing it. We must adjourn. Besides, I want to hear your objections. I know they'll rise thick and three- fold, when you've left me. When shall I hear them ; to-morrow ? ' ' To-morrow let it be, with all my heart ! I doubt you've given me a bad nightcap, though ! WTien I get a subject of this sort into my head, it sings in my ears half the night : and when at last I do go to sleep, I dream of it till I 'wake again. Well ! " In for a penny," as they say : so I shall be glad to hear it out. Maybe you'll finish it to-morrow. I don't think I shall ever look at a plough again without thinking of you ! ' And Mr. Greening took his departure ; not more busily impregnated with a new subject than he left o 194 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. me with an old one: for of all the stimulants to deeper thought in your own mind, what so powerful as the sustained effort to develope your earlier conceptions by the slow and detailed process of con- versation, and that with a not too easy orunobjective listener ? Idle and valueless as yet, as the unsmelted Ore, is the Thought that has not been struck out into the current coin of simple words. And this once accomplished, who shall say where that currency may lead, or in whose hands it may yet thrive, hereafter ? ' Steam-power, no more to do with the Plough than a Horse has do with a Spade.' XXI. THE STEAM-CULTIVATOR.' WHAT an irresistible tendency there is amongst men to draw each other in caricature ! How prone we are to magnify those features in which the character of another differs from our own ! I doubt not that if Mr. Greening had described our late interviews ( ( if the lion had been the sculptor '), our readers would have been at least as much amused, the other way. I should like much to see the ' per contra ' that he would have drawn out. I am justly led to this conclusion because my notes of our further conversations show how completely I had underrated both his interest, and his penetration, in the subject I had so suddenly broached before him ; taking it too readily for granted, that a thoroughly practical man, like himself, could not stretch his ima- gination to the point required to make him enter into my views, or the suggestions I had made. This was far from being the case. He had heard, o 2 196 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. I suspect, and interpreted too, after his own fashion, every word I had said and read to him. For, after our late-described interviews, his ' trespasses,' as he called them, on my Farm became more and more fre- quent. Whether it was that he thought the demerits and deficiencies of the plough were more strikingly to be seen and freely studied upon my soil than on his own, or whether he reckoned upon the chance of hear- ing them more boldly outspoken, I will not attempt to decide : but for some reason or other I soon found him a frequent, and by degrees a more (so to speak) long-winded listener. Not a week had elapsed after our last conversation, when a rainy day drove him into my den for shelter, and as ready a prey as any beast that ever roamed the wilds of agricultural theory could desire. * I'm afeard,' he began, after ensconcing himself in the very same chair, with one of the very same cigars, opposite the same fireplace, and in precisely the same attitude ' I'm afeard it won't leave off for some time. I should like to hear you out, Sir, about that Steam-ploughing I beg pardon Steam not-plough- ing " cultivation " anything you like to call it, that you was on about the other day. I don't know how it is, but it seems to haunt me like. You've done THE 'STEAM-CULTIVATOR.' 197 me harm [" Hal " ?] you have indeed ! I used to love follering the plough, and see it heave up the furrow- slice so smooth and nice, and swelling the rich earth as it swam along, better than anything else I know on earth except, perhaps, hearing my little Fanny reading when I come home sleepy at nights, but now I don't know how it is, I seem to run my head agin' it every time I see it, on stiff land, a-squeeging and pressing and kneading its way along : it gives me the very headache to look at it ; it does really ! Now, please not to mind about the long words, for once ; but let me hear it on to the end. I should like to know the worst on it and the best if there is any. I want to know now, really, why, if Steam's the pro- per thing why it hasn't been done. They do most things by steam now-a-days : if it is to get upon the fields, why don't it ? What stops it ? ' s You have asked me,' said I, ( the very question I ask too Why is it that amongst all the great inven- tions of the day, the subject of CULTIVATION BY STEAM seems to hang fire ? Not for want of thought upon the topic ; for there are many minds full of thought about it, and few people now-a-days believe the thing impracticable : indeed, no one can find any good reason why it should be so. There is no parti- 198 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. cular difficulty or peculiarity about the mechanism of cultivation, to " forbid the banns " between the soil and the steam-engine : it is generally felt that the match will take place some day, slow and unpromising as the courtship may seem at present. I join hands in this belief; and in the meantime ask your special attention to these preliminary points, which may help to account for past delay, and possibly to advance the question from its present silent condition. Silent, because invention is apt to be so. Self-interest keeps it so ; and in the meantime a generation may pass by, and nothing be practically done towards a consum- mation which, once accomplished, it requires no ghost to see that Great Britain would leap ahead in agri- culture as much as her mines of coal and iron, and her still deeper and richer mine of mechanical skill and improvement, have led her to do in every art and manufacture upon which the breath of steam has been brought to bear.' Here in fact lies the grand motive in the matter ; and one so emphatically important in reference to this particular application of steam-power yet to be achieved that one cannot help wishing that all who really think at all about it who are not of that class of infidels who think the womb of invention is age- THE 'STEAM-CULTIVATOR.' 199 stricken, and that nothing is possible but what has been done would come into committee upon the sub- ject, and abating a little of that exclusive faith which each has in his own cleverness and chance, would help to bring in this tide, as the tide of human progress is wont to come in not by one great wave, all at once, but a great many waves after and upon each other. There is one grain of comfort, and of corresponding hope, visible already. A good many thinkers have got quit of the ste&m-plough, and got as far as the spade : that is something. It is something, I repeat, to have got to the spade ; for those who have got thus far will not stay long there. The public mind moves slowly ; but once in motion, the inertia once shaken off, and the vis inertia once set a-going, it will never stop till it reaches the goal. Again and again be it repeated, that it is not ploughing, neither is it digging, that we want. These are only means. What we want is the end : we care not for the process. Give me A SEED-BED : show me the soil comminuted, aerated, and inverted, six or eight inches deep, and I will not ask you how it came so. What does that matter ? If you wanted your coffee ground for breakfast, to a certain fineness of texture, would you be very particular to ask whether the mill 200 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. that crushed the fragment berry had worked by hori- zontal, vertical, alternate, elbow-crank, or by circular motion ? If the farmer or the gardener could only have his seed-bed made ready for him as fine as a new mole-heap, or to any other coarser texture, according as he wants it, do you think he would care whether the soil had been first cut into longitudinal strips, plough-fashion, or into square cubes, spade-fashion, before it was finally granulated for use ? Surely the one is as indifferent as the other ; and singularly enough, both offer problems far more difficult to the steam-engine (if anything can be called so), than the performance at once of the ultimate and entire process without these preliminary forms at all. Until steam-power was discovered, this possibility did not exist. Wind and water power being out of the question, there remained nothing for it no other power that could be taken to the field but men or horses. Ploughing or digging, then, were the indis- pensable preliminaries : there was no getting on with- out them : they were but preliminaries, it is true, the former leaving everything, the latter a great deal (according as the work was done) to be accomplished afterwards to complete the cultivation. But it is not so now. Since the birth of the steam- THE * STEAM-CtJLTIVATOfl.' 201 engine no such very long time ago the whole ele- ments of the question are altered. There exists now a portable power not limited to horizontal action like the horse, nor to vertical action like a man with spade or hoe, a power which, if merely told what to do, will go and do it, merely dropping a hint into your ear that circular motion is its favourite. But the willing giant stands idly panting and smok- ing : for nobody can agree to tell him what to do. One says, ' Go and plough ! ' another says, ' Go and dig? each mistaking the means for the end, and trying to yoke this youngest born of human genius to the peddling routine of manual or equine capacity ; out of the very perversity of backsightedness that clings to forms and modes which belonged to the implements, not to the task, backsightedness that would with equal reason puzzle its brains in looking for the pole and splinter-bar of a locomotive, the pendulum of a watch, or the paddle-boxes of a screw-steamer. But if it is not ploughing, and it is not digging, what is it ? ' Go to the Mole, thou dullard ' (the old proverb might be travestied), ' consider her ways and be wise,' who without any coulter, share, or mould- board without spade, hoe, or pickaxe leaves be- hind her in her rapid track a finer mould than ever 202 CHRONIC LES OF A CLAY FARM. BANSOME, HOWAED, or CEOSSKILL than ever spade or rake produced, or the most careful-handed gardener chopped up, to pot his plants with. The very rabbit that scratches his hole in the ground, or the fox that scratches after him, like a king-crab, to eat the kernel and lie in the shell, or the dog that scratches after both, the whole tribe of ( claw-foot ' in fact, had scratched hard earth into soft mould before ever the plough or the spade, or even the more ancient Hoe, had broken ground on this planet. Let us begin from the beginning : let us take * Cultivation ' itself into thought for a serious mo- ment, and analyze it into its simplest elements, dropping all conventionalities of plodding custom. What is it? How would you do it, if you had neither plough nor spade nor hoe nor rake to help you ? Surely with the same tool that the Monks of La Trappe use to dig their graves, and in the same manner ! If the mole, the rabbit, the fox, the dog, are not sufficient indicators, take the hand of man, glove it with hardened steel, multiply it a dozen or twenty times, till you have an instrument as broad as CEOSSKILL'S clod-crusher, each hand or claw with its separate arm forming the radius from a central shaft, which bristles all around with a forest THE ' STEAM-CULTIVATOB.' 203 of such arms, a sort of revolving BRIAREUS, not rolling let that be especially remembered but steam- driven, a thousand dog-power if you please, for we must not even mention horses, or we shall drop back into the old Scylla and Charybdis of * traction ' and of * rolling,' two ideas each to be eschewed like poison. Let us suppose the picture of this formidable- looking cylinder of claws to be sufficiently described, for the moment reminding one, at a distant view, of a half-breed between a hay-tedding machine and a CROSSKILL'S clod-crusher (but unlike them, fun- damentally distinct from any and every instrument that was ever seen afield, as doing its work not by traction, not by its rolling weight, but DRIVEN by its axis, as the steam-paddle, the circular saw, the driving-wheel of the locomotiye, are driven), sup- ported by its own apparatus, and abrading the soil with'its armed teeth, first cutting its trench, burying itself to the required depth, and then commencing its onward task, tearing down the bank (so to speak) on the advancing side, canting back the abraded soil, earth's saw-dust,' comminuted, aerated, inverted,' into the trench it leaves behind. If I have failed in making the picture clear or 204 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. intelligible, it is yet not that about which I care so much, as to * draw aside the curtain.' The idea of ploughing and digging stands like a thick blind before the whole philosophy of the subject, and screens the inventive mechanician from the simple application of his mind to the quod est faciendum. His faculties are clogged, stupefied, held in check by the pestering contemplation of processes that enter not necessarily into the problem to be solved, nor need appear in its solution. They are unessential to the matter. They became so the very instant the steam-engine was discovered; a power, and the only one we possess, that can be carried to the field, and put into an agricultural machine like the main- spring into a watch to give it independent intrinsic action within itself, owing nothing to, but entirely separate from, the traction and progression of the implement along the field. Hitherto there is not even the attempt so to apply it ; it has never had a chance. Every field-implement we have, works by traction like the Pedometer that ticks because the wearer marches ; but with steam for our mainspring, we can make the watch tick independent of the wearer. When we understand that, when we have in idea and in fact detached the ivork of cultivation from the THE ' STEAM-CULTIVATOR.' 205 mere progression of the implement, made them per- fectly separate and independent, so that if you ceased to proceed, your ' coffee-mill ' would still be at work, and only wanting fresh coffee to grind ; then, and only then, shall we have laid hold of the end of the clue that leads to Cultivation by Steam ; for then, and only then, shall we have begun to appreciate the real and unique value of the new agent we possess. To suppose that it would gear its noble faculty to the dragging of ploughs, or the redoubled solecism of a rolling spade-machine, is to overlook the axioms of natural law, the fundamental relations and exactions that govern the progress and throw light upon the history of Invention. ' The willing giant stands idly panting and smoking.' XXII. . THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. I CAN call to mind no practice, in the intercourse with others, more improving, sometimes more humi- liating, than the attempt to explain in clear words to a listener not disposed to give much quarter, an idea with which one's own mind has been long familiar. A large portion of what we call our ' mind ' consists of the Imagination, a proverbial deceiver, painting images (as its name implies) upon the retina of thought, apparently all real, but fading into dimness, crumbling often into the utmost confusion and intri- cacy under the attempt at delineation by the tongue. This is of e very-day experience. But there is another traitor not so commonly arraigned and brought to trial, the Memory. What has long been on our minds, we are apt to regard as we do those faces that we have met again and again, and only become con- THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 207 scious of our ignorance when we have occasion to address the owners by name. * Talking makes a ready man, reading a full man, writing an exact man,' says the old proverb. That laying out of a subject in detail which talking requires, Clothing it in simple and intelligible language, yet illustrated with analogies and metaphor, suited to the individual addressed, is an exercise in itself susceptible of such improvement, that one is sometimes tempted to ask, whether, after all, language owes more to Thought, or thought to Language. And thus, in the conversations that ensued with Mr. Greening, derived from my original promise to him to put this question of Steam-cultivation into * plain English,' I soon felt that it is one thing to see a matter as plain as a pike-staff before your own mind prepared to understand it, and a very different thing to make it intelligible to those who have never given any express attention to it before. In defe- rence to its importance I will try to restate the whole question ; dropping, for continuity's sake, the dia- logue form in which the subject was, by frequent and useful objections on his part, made to develope itself. 208 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. Before the discovery of Steam-power, and its application to machinery, there was no such thing as a motive power that could be carried about, and applied where and when and how you pleased, except animal power. The plough, the spade, or the hoe ( with their varieties), were the only possible modes of effecting the task of cultivation. The comparatively recent discovery of steam-power altered the condition of human life in this particular. The modes of action to which cultivation was before limited, and which are exemplified in the use of the three instruments just named, became, on the discovery of steam, no longer the necessary and only modes of performing the act of tillage. From the nature of things it was morally certain that whenever that new Power was applied to this act, it would be through an instru- mentality as different from the plough, as the plough was from the spade. If a man will only give him- self the trouble to think how total a revolution the application of steam effected in the navigation of a ship, and the locomotion of a carriage, he cannot very well fail to see what is meant by the saying that a new power requires a new process. It is a solecism in dirt, as well as science, to attempt to yoke THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 209 steam to a plough. There is no affinity between them ; any more than, as I said before, between a horse and a spade. I have found it inexpressibly difficult to get this leading postulate clearly and once for all understood. Till it is so it is hopeless to attempt to proceed. The idea of an instrument to be dragged through the soil, as a plough is, from one end of a field to another, poisons, more or less, nearly every effort towards steam-cultivation I have seen. How difficult it is to wwlearn ! When the attempt was first made to run steam- carnages on common roads, it was soon found that however good a macadamized surface might be for a wheel to roll upon, under a carriage drawn by horses, it broke away into a perfect gravel-bed when the new power, instead of pulling the carriage (the wheels simply rolling underneath), laid hold of the Wheel itself, and produced the locomotion of the vehicle by forcibly driving that round. The very best road gave way under the severe friction of this new mode of producing locomotion, and so did the tires : and nothing could be done till both road and wheel were made of solid iron. The new power requires a new p 210 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FAKM. process. Instead of pulling the carriage it drove the wheel, and in driving the wheel it tore up the stones of a granite road. Let us put on our Agricultural spectacles, and apply this parable. When Steam-power is brought into the field (audiat qui aures habet !), it will * play out this play ' over again. Its faculty and virtue consist not in pulling vehicles or implements, but in driving wheels : and when steam-driven wheels will tear up granite road into shingle and gravel, and move the Carriage too (for so it did, only not fast enough for modern travellers), what forbids the hint being taken by the t audax Japeti genus,' that have happily applied so many accidental hints before, and the same refractory giant being set to rasp up cleverly and methodically with sharpened Mole-like claws the tender soil, when he has shown his ability to tear so tough a one with the mere palm of his hand? And what forbids, either, that he should spare off a little of his redundant steam in moving his own carcass along, meanwhile, at a pace under half a mile an hour ? * What you lose in speed you gain in power ; ' and an instrument which completes the whole work of tillage, as it moves along, will THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 211 hardly be required to go much faster. At that speed it would cover four acres a day not of e ploughing,' not of ( harrowing,' not of e rolling,' not of 'scuffling,' not of ' rolling again? ' cross-ploughing,' ' clod- crushing,' ' rolling again,'' ( ridging up,' ' sowing,' and ' harrowing in ; ' but of all these epithet pro- cesses in one comprehensive act and word Cul- tivation. Is it not astonishing, with such experiences as we have before us in England, that since the first intro- duction of Steam-power to the notice and assistance of mankind, nobody has ever yet attempted to apply it in its own way to the definite and simple work of cultivation ? It is put to cut chaff, to make saw-dust, to granulate powder, to make pins' heads, to reduce all sorts of coarse material into fine and all by wheels, circular motion, and nothing else, for nothing else will it accept, but nobody can per- suade his mind to believe that by the self-same action, and no other, it can cut up a seam of soil eight inches deep and five feet wide, and leave it behind granulated to as coarse or fine a texture as the nature of the seed or season may require, and inverted in its bed. It is not ploughing, it is not P 2 212 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FAKM. digging, it is not harrowing, raking, hoeing, rolling, scarifying, clod-crushing, scuffling, grubbing, ridging, casting, gathering, that we want : all these are the time-honoured, time-bothered means to a certain RESULT. That result is a seed-bed : and a seed- bed is, simply described, a layer of soil from six to twelve inches in depth, rendered fine by comminution, and as far as possible inverted during the process. You may call this ' Theory,' my good Mr. Prac- tical, but I tell you it is TRUTH : simple, philoso- phical, practical Truth. Since the Invention of the Steam-engine, it might and may be done at one process, as easily as before in twenty : and it will be. Before we depart this life, we shall see one more wonder moving upon the face of the earth, some- thing of this form and fashion to wit a complete locomotive engine on four wheels, the fore pair turning on a transome, the hind ones fixed ; behind them a transverse cylindrical shaft, about three feet in diameter, and from five to six feet long, reminding one of a cross between a clod-crusher and a hay-tedding machine, armed with steel tine-points, in shape like a mole's claw, arranged so that the side-lap of each claw may cover the THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 213 work of the other, and no interval or ridge be left uncut: the extremities of the cylinder just cover- ing the wheel-tracks. This cylinder of claws you will see raised or depressed at pleasure by the engine-driver, and adjusted to slow or rapid revo- lutions, worked either by cog-wheels, or geared from the drum of the Engine. TJiat is the * cultivator.' A platform from the Engine extends over it, ending in a sort of movable tail-board, which may be raised or depressed at pleasure, to regulate the settlement of the soil which scatters from it. The revolution of the cylinder is not against but with that of the wheels, not dragging or retarding, but rather favour- ing the advance of the whole machine,' which is moved slowly forward by detached power from the Engine. When, at some future day, and by some pen not yet out of straight strokes and pothooks, there shall be written, for the edification of the next agricultural public, an historical sketch of the ' Rise and Pro- gress of STEAM CULTIVATION,' it is to be feared that some of the reflections will not be of the most complimentary kind to the genius or the faith of the generation that has embraced nearly in one expe- 214 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. rience the development of Steam Navigation, of the Railroad system, the Electric Telegraph, and other kindred appliances in the many-pathed field of prac- tical science. 'It was strange,' we may suppose our future annalist to write, 'that amidst the blaze of sur- rounding discovery in the arts that economize the labour and advance the condition of man, an appli- cation of steam-power that must surely have pressed with such powerful motive and exigency on a period when circumstances seemed especially to evoke the mechanical resources of the kingdom, by way of set- off to its often-urged disadvantages in climate and in fiscal burdens, should have been long regarded rather with the apathy evinced towards the cobweb speculations of dreaming enthusiasm, than dealt with as a practical question by practical minds. While zealous agriculturists were eloquently excited once a year over the weight of an ox, or the twist of an improved mould-board, " Science " was satisfied, and " Practice " seemed to tread on the heels of perfec- tion ! Under such patronage, " Improvements " in the established implements of tillage were of course as numerous as the moiety of twenty acres of ground THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 215 could conveniently accommodate for annual Exhi- bition. A revolution impending over Tillage itself was of course the last thing dreamt of. It is ever so. True, a few black funnels might be seen smoking in the show-yard, and the whirling drum of the steam- driven Threshing-machine had, thanks to the previous invention of a certain Scotch lawyer, made the agrestial mind forget to expect, or its prizes to stimulate, improvements in the Flail. But the prin- cipal and tune-honoured act of agriculture proper, of cultivation itself, still laboured under its ancient tribe of horse-adapted implements. The Plough and the Harrow were still in the ascendant: the instru- ments of equine-tillage were still received as its essential agents ; and people who would have smiled at the mechanical curiosity of a steam-Flail, gravely anticipated the day when some such combination would be triumphantly achieved for the darling tool whose Heaven-invoked " speed " had long supplied the toast and figure-head of " Prosperity to Agri- culture." ( Yet it can hardly be wondered at,' our aggra- vating Critic will continue, e that men should have slowly and with such difficulty eradicated from their 216 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. minds a mode of tillage so long compelled by the very nature and necessity of animal power : every child that has wept and smiled over the " Death of Cock-robin " knows when he hears Who'll toll the bell ? " I," says the Bull, " Because I can pull" that Mr. Bull was guilty of a pun ; that the ' pull ' of a quadruped is only horizontal ; that his strength can be applied in no other way ; and that when you employ a four-footed beast to cultivate the soil, you have no choice left but horizontal traction, from one end of the field to the other ; a mode of action which commenced when the spade was abandoned in field- culture for the plough, and which was to continue so long as horse-power tillage continued; and no longer: since it formed (as the spade had already shown) no necessary element of cultivation, and had no relevance whatever with the action or capabilities of the Steam-engine. ' Steam-power having, however, been hitherto chiefly employed in Manufactures, and its versatile modes of application being unfamiliar to the agricul- turist, we can scarcely be surprised, that even those THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 217 few who gave a serious thought to' the subject, looked upon the Steam-engine rather as a piece of concentrated horse-power to be harnessed as best it might to the existing horse-worked implements, than as a New Agent, whose entry on the scene of action enabled him to reconsider the whole philosophy of Tillage, to analyze it into its elements, to see what it is; what it had been when confined to manual power under the primeval dynasty of the Spade and Hoe ; what it was under the advanced but equally special limitations of animal power, as exhibited in the Plough and every other implement of draught ; and what it might be under the wider sphere of available process which the Steam-engine presented. What was cultivation ? Did Steam-power offer any cheaper, better, or more direct mode of performing it, than manual or animal power had done ? Could it accom- plish in one act the problem of converting the hard clod into fine soil ? Could it, like the little Mole, cut a seed-bed out of the solid ? If so, why entangle it with implements foreign to its nature, unessential to its action, and behind it in that order of inventive progress whose deep-cut label is " Vestigia NULLA EETKORSUM " ? 218 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. ' But the Plough had left its ridge-and-furrow impress not more in the fields than, alas ! on the mind of the agriculturist of that day. It was long, and naturally so, before he could bring an imagina- tion preoccupied with the old-established system of field-culture, to recognise its impending emancipation from the whole chain of subordinate necessities ex- acted by the employment of horse-labour. The old fable had become reversed : the quadruped was riding the man : and to shake him off was now the difficulty ! For a century after its invention, the Steam-engine lay still-born to the soil, and the virtue unappreciated of a new power which could antiquate mere imple- ments altogether, and convert the cultivating agent into a machine, in the strict sense of the word ; a machine whose locomotion across the field was a mere collateral incident, not a means ; as the sheep, or ox, walks over the pasture to crop it, but does not crop it by walking. * And yet it was somewhat strange, too, that re- cognition should have been so tardy, and prejudice so ineradicable on this point, when we reflect that modes of tillage already existed, so totally and specifically different in action from all horse-worked implements, as those both of the Spade and its more ancient con- THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 219 gener the Hoe ;* and that the perpendicular and very effective action of these manual tools, contrasted with the farm implements of draught, might have dimly suggested the possible discovery of other means of cultivation as different from all of these as they were from each other. Anyone who had ever seen a nutmeg rasped away into fine atoms against the armed surface of a grater, or saw-dust scattered in heaps from timber by the teeth of a circular saw, and could find room in his imaginative faculty for the contemplation of this mechanical process, side by side with the agricultural fact that a seed-bed is only a layer of comminuted soil a few inches in depth, might surely (one should now suppose) have saved the credit of his generation by some more congenial suggestion for the effectuation of tillage by Steam- power, than attempting to bind it down to an ap- prenticeship in which Ploughs and Harrows, Rollers * In some of the southern countries of Europe, as in Spain and Portugal, and in the offshoots of the latter Madeira and Brazil the Hoe is the almost exclusive implement of (manual) tillage. The spade is, originally, a form of the Hoe, adapted to more northerly climates, where the moistness of the soil increases the lahour of cultivation by forbidding the tread of the work- man on the worked land, and obliges him to stand on the 'land- side ' of the trench. 220 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. and Scufflers, or even the spade, were still to figure as the rude terms of the Indenture, as out of keep- ing with its genius and aptitude, as they were non- essential to tillage itself analytically regarded, apart from its conventional modes necessitated by horse or hand-power.' Such will be the kind of after-reflection thrown back upon his forefathers of this generation by our future agricultural historian. * It is true,' he will be obliged to add, * there were not wanting heaps of patents and pretensions crowding in confused suc- cession on the public notice, during this period of inventive decrepitude. Wherever there is a lack of grain, there are plenty of weeds to fill the gaping space. There were plough-dragging engines, sta- tionary and locomotive there were "ploughshares on circular frames," " revolving spades," and all the train of piebald monstrosities and biform incongrui- ties that mark those periods of false gestation and miscarriage in the annals of invention, when would- be discoverers, dashing blindfold at unconsidered combinations, are each profoundly busy putting " new wine into old bottles ; " never devoting one serious hour of study to the simple elements of the problem they undertake, the mechanical act to THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 221 be accomplished, and the mechanical means ne- cessary to accomplish it ; but (like the scribe who ventured a treatise on Chinese Metaphysics, by searching for " China " and " Metaphysics " in the Cyclopaedia !) taking a plough and a steam-engine or a spade and a steam-engine as the inevitable sire and dam of the fore-determined " cross," plunged headlong into the labyrinth of complex and solitary contrivance how to join things which Nature had put asunder.' ' velut aegri Somniu, vanse Fingentur species j ut nee pes, nee caput uni Reddatur fonnse. * * Infelix operis Sumrna, quia ponere totum Nesciat ! ' Such, we may anticipate, will be the storm of keen reflection showered over our graves by some writer of the end of this, or beginning of next cen- tury, who looks back upon the origin of steam- agriculture from just such a point as we do now on that of steam-navigation ; who will be as familiar with the sight of soil pulverized a foot deep, in one act, by surface abrasion from a steam-driven cylinder [armed with the Talpaian claw that * works i' the earth so fast,' and solves in the dark, beneath our 222 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. very feet, a harder problem !] as we are with ships of a couple of thousand tons, driven through the water like a duck with her web-feet at work beside or be- hind her, in either case obedient to the steam-law of circular motion. Vestigia mulla retrorsum." 223 XXIII. MACHINERY ON THE CLAYS. * MATTER is infinitely divisible,' says the philo- sopher. * Cultivation consists in pulveration? says Tull. * The greater the comminution of the soil, that is, the exposure of its internal superficies, the greater its power to absorb Ammonia, the essence of manure, from that great storehouse of fertility the atmosphere,' says the chemist. * Soils,' says the geologist, ' consist of three elements, Clay, Sand, and Lime; the more suitably they are inter-combined, the more fertile the resulting combination.' All this looks simple enough. Yet in the judicious application of these few truths lie the great practical problems of Husbandry ! All truth is simple : * Sim- plicity is the test of Truth.' Yet, like the three pri- mary colours, ' Red,' ( Yellow,' and 'Blue,' bright, clear, and simple as they are to the eye, how in- finite their varieties of combination ; what scope for judgment, or for error, in their admixture, or that of 224 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. their Secondaries ; what ample room for blunder, what diversity of apparent ' accident ' and mischance, what damage of unlooked-for incident and unallowed- for circumstance! What open, pathless wastes for the blunderer and the empiric, what narrow and dif- ficult steeps for the student who has the heart to climb ! O Agriculture ! thou Science of sciences without a School, thou Philosophy without a ' Porch ' (even for shelter!), thou University of unexamined gradu- ates, all ' Masters ' and no * Students ' when will thy * degrees' be better recognised, thy principles be more truly studied, thy 'privileges' be better appreci- ated, for being the better understood ? When will men consent condescend to LEAEN an Art that claims a share of light, and illustration, and practical advancement, from every physical science that has sprung into being, since Bacon traced out knowledge to its source, and Chemistry, THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATTER, gave the best of posthumous illustration to that great inductive theory that rests all knowledge on the one sole basis of Experiment ? When that day comes when the living chemistry of the Soil is accepted and understood, not as an amus- ing and probable speculation, the vaguely suggestive MACHINERY OF THE CLAYS. 225 subject of a * Lecture' before a patronizing Council ; but as a solid, working-day, every-day, practical fact, then the Mechanics of agriculture will not be far behind ! Then the * touching truisms' of Tull the Galileo of agricultural science, the Luther of modern husbandry, struggling single-handed against a whole Dark-age of ignorance and banded prejudice will reach the * promised land' he saw and pointed out with the finger of the seer, but was never allowed to enter. Blending into the truest of union with the after- discoveries of Davy, De Candolle, Liebig, Boussin- gault, and our own not less deserving Johnston and Lawes, and others of distinguished note, his theory of ' Cultivation' will propound matter of deep thought and combined action equally to the chemist and mechanician. When the simple mechanical idea of pulveration, comminution, subdivision, or by whatever other long name men may please to understand it, shall be seen in its chemical meaning, as connected with the food of plants the * pasture of roots', as Jethro Tull, with appropriate metaphor, described it, then the claim and application of the Steam-engine will be made out and recognized, and the name of James Watt will be found as important to agriculture as that of Humphry Davy. 226 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. It is a mere question of Time. We travel slowly ; and, like lazy wheelers, throw back our ears and bite the pulling horse : but if ever the shadow of a coming event Avas visible beforehand, even to the ?^imagi- native eye, this of the true mechanism of Cultivation is one that is beginning to be visible. Call the Seer ' visionary,' if you please. Visionary ! of course he is visionary ! it is his place and office, his duty and profession to be so, and to bear the consequence ! He sees in 'vision :' it is by far-sighted vision that he catches sight of the * man's hand' in the horizon, which others cannot see, and will not believe till it touches their eyeballs. And then they will swear they always saw it, and will have forgotten that they ever didn't see it. The man was never yet found that would head a deputation to carry the world's recanta- tion and apology to the derided prophet whose derided prophecy has come true. With the advent of the Fact, dies out the prophet's only distinction, to be ridiculed. Such was ever his fate ; and will be, to the end of time ; varied only by the politer form and phase that civilization gives to persecution. Yet, in the present active progress of invention, the transition is so rapid between one phase of our industrial condition and another, that the difficulty of MACHINERY OF THE CLAYS. 227 inducing men to realize the possibility of a coming discovery seems almost to tread upon the heels of the after-difficulty of recalling the memory of a deficiency that has been supplied. The paradox of to-day be- comes the truism of to-morrow. And in spite of all her wonderful advancement in arts and manufactures, in spite of all her great names in every department of practical science, there is no country where both these phases of mind, apparently so inconsistent with each other, coexist more pertinaciously, more perma- nently, than in England. The truth is that, opposed as they appear to be, they are the two sides of one and the same character, a character eminently and essentially practical, which cannot recognize anything but what is, and will con- sent to look neither into the future nor the past with a very patient gaze. We smile at the imaginative habit of mind of the German, and the precipitate quickness of the Frenchman ; yet in fact, through sheer practical industry, we surpass in effective pro- gress the dreams of the one, and the quick conceits and anticipations of the other. But, inestimably valuable in result, this national character makes invention excessively difficult, except Q 2 228 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. where it drops in as it were in the course of business, suggests itself to the mind of the workman, and in a workman-like way, to ease him in his task, or to shorten a process done for the thousandth time before the abbreviating link in the chain of practical cause and effect forced itself upon his notice. Anything like a priori investigation of a problem elementary view of the principles lying at the root of a process is with us the rarest source of invention. Thus it is that a clever machine makes the workmen employed upon it intelligent ; as the insect takes its colour from the leaf it feeds on. Discovery follows discovery in rapid succession ; and each room in a cotton mill or manufactory, we are informed as we pass through, presents an accumulation of little additions and improvements, a hive of ingenuity as well as industry, all resulting, as it were, spontaneously from the sug- gestive influence upon the workman, of the machine that at once employs and instructs him. Not so in Agriculture ! The educational effect of the Steam-engine upon those it employs, so strikingly visible in manufactures whose date is of yesterday, has here not begun its gracious operation. Here the new power has not yet come in to suggest new pro- cesses. The hind ploughs as his fathers ploughed, as MACHINERY OF THE CLAYS. 229 the Roman ploughed, as the Egyptian ploughed: and with even less advantage : for in the dry soils and climates of Rome and Egypt the plough was an apter instrument of cultivation than in our damp soil under our northern sky. True, a better machinery has found its way into the more intricate task of threshing out the grain, and from that it has still more recently crept, backwards, from the last operation of threshing the grain, to that of reaping it. For it is curious to notice, in passing, that it has begun at the latter end of the farmer's labour, a significant token perhaps of its ultimate direction and success, in the earlier details of field-work. The Flail was the first to give way : and by the ingenuity of Menzies, the revolving drum of the Threshing-machine, beating out the grain by continuous circular motion, was substituted for the alternate strokes of the flail (just as in navigation, the circular Paddle took place of the back-and- forward action of the Oar), whilst the horse-power was concentrated round a pivot, the nearest approach horse-power has made to what we commonly under- stand by the word Machinery. This point achieved, the introduction of the Steam-engine to that branch of farm operations was at once made easy. The right 230 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. motion existed before the Steam-engine was brought to bear upon it. Once let this be done for clay-soil cultivation; once let all that has been said and written, and proved, about the properties of such soil, and the properties of the atmosphere, the habits of plants and instincts of roots, condense into an act of mechanism whose aim and object shall be the most perfect sub- division that can be effected at a single operation ; and the conquest of the clays is achieved. It will then be seen that none but a PORTABLE power could accomplish it, that its practicability lay hidden in the womb of the future, till the Steam-engine appeared, and manual and horse power were severally discarded, the one to the garden, the other to the road, where locomotion from place to place is a real and primary object of the power and mechanism employed. The infinitely graduated varieties of soil that exist between the lightest sand and the stiffest clay, pre- venting as they have done that marked line of different treatment that a more rigid contrast of the opposed qualities of sand and clay would have sug- gested, together with the further variations of ' temper ' alternating with the conditions of wet and MACHINERY OF THE CLAYS. 231 dry, have been too much perverted to the result of making the agriculturist a Jack-of-all-trades. He goes out of a light-soil farm into a clay, or vice versa, and plunges his share into the new element with about as much unconcern as his wife puts her duck- eggs under a hen to be hatched and educated. Plump goes the little brood of changelings into the first pool of water, incontinently bent on their baptism of native mud, to the consternation of the astounded mother, who vainly plies her claw in scratching on the sandy shore for unsuited food, croaking out her frantic warnings to the contumacious family of webfoot. With about as intelligent a philosophy as she exhibits under such distressful and hopeless circumstances, has many a plough been stuck into the clays. But no- thing can express the truth in shorter phrase than that of old Dobson * I tell you, Sir, it's a different trade! ' No wonder then that ' the best form of the Plough is still matter of disagreement.' It must ever be so, as long as Clay and Sand are things as opposed in nature to each other as positive and negative. A stiff clay under a moist climate, the greater its mechanical disadvantage, and its intrinsic chemical superiority, 232 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. (and both are fully admitted), the more it seems to call for a revolution in its mode of culture, for a system peculiar to itself. In the arts, as well as in morals, * Difficulties are opportunities.' ' Incontinently bent on their baptism of native mud. 1 XXIV. CONCLUSION. DAY after ctay, month after month, year after year, the labour of the Husbandman begins afresh. It is without end, middle, or beginning. It defies the ' Unities' of Time and Action. And as its nature is, so must be its everlasting development, literary as well as otherwise. To give it a somewhat livelier tongue to rescue it, at least for an occasional hour, from a tone and treatment which, under the boasted title of ' practical,' would scare away from its deeply interesting discussion all that has adorned as well as advanced so many other equally laborious and less naturally attractive pursuits, was the motive that sug- gested the too desultory chronicle of deeds, of words, of thoughts, that these pages have imperfectly re- corded. A story without an end, a soliloquy without a speaker, a dialogue without a denouement, and, what is worse than all, a e Farm to let' without a Tenant ! Such is the discursive and informal shape taken, as of 234 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. its own accord, by a series of extracts from a journal extending over many years, of which it will be enough if he who reads shall haply say, he * could have better spared a better' tale. But though it break and baffle every rule of lite- rary composition though it leave every interest un- satisfied, every curiosity unquenched let it not be deficient in the one intransgressible rule of Harmony to end in the Key-note: and so doing, let it speak at least with one consistency, and leave upon the ear one simple and abiding chord that may link it with pleasant memories, and, if more and better yet than this may be hoped, may lighten and sustain the soli- tary hour of some future toiler, striving all alone, and far away from suitable converse and encourage- ment, to solve the tedious problem presented by a difficult soil, and, what is more difficult than that to cure or cope with, intractable opinions, and minds that no argument can reach, no evidence assure. Bowed by an affliction, for which life contains no cure, and calendaring his remaining years of earthly solitude as a schoolboy marks off one by one the weary list of weeks that must intervene before the joyful hour that shall restore him to all he has lately parted from, the writer of these pages was fain to CONCLUSION. 235 welcome the emprise of a task which might have scared away, as indeed it had done, all to whom life was not so dead, that the only thing that could rise again upon it was a blister. Such was in truth the condition under which, to the amazement of that surrounding world called * Friends,' and the consternation of that critic's gallery, called Tenantry, I ventured on the solitary occupation of a farm whose desolate and repulsive features have been sufficiently portrayed, and with little of exaggeration. Steeped to the eyes in all those notions of science and exactness which a work- ing University experiences, and * those Temples twain, Inner and Middle,' may be supposed to infuse into the brains of younger sons, I plunged into my task with all that sanguine and pedantic enthusiasm best known, in farming, under the expressive title of * Fire-edge.' * A blessed thing,' I have before said, ' is the untaught boldness of youth ! ' a blessed thing in its way, and in its time and place. It is as much intended, and has its appointed task, in the great Order and Economy of things, as the most cautious sagacity and profound experience of advanced life. * There is that scattereth and yet increaseth : ' and He who appointed life as an advancing experience, CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. appointed every part of it to accomplish, and to vindi- cate, its appropriate phase and character. So I now feel it, whether I mentally review the en- terprise, labour, and amusement of years gone by, or whether I look over the comparatively reclaimed acres and shrub-embosomed homestead of the once dreary spot it was my privilege to find * thrown upon my hands' at a moment when the drearier waste within defied the outer landscape. Could the scene be pre- sented to me again with the aspect it once wore, I should hardly, even with the bought economy of ex- perience, have the boldness to attack it : but if com- pelled to do so by duty or necessity, the only difference in my course would be a more resolute and compre- hensive plan, based upon a deeper reliance on my first instincts and judgment, unchilled by the timid and discouraging language which surrounding practice casts, in nearly every district, across the path of the improver in agriculture. Whence this timidity and this discouragement ? With the attempt to answer this important question my task shall be concluded ; and the personal experience of a landowner occupying the most diffi- cult of his own farms, and striving to ' sound the bass string' of the matter, by assuming the actual circum- CONCLUSION. 237 stance and position of those whose interests it was his duty to study and understand, shall be stated, with such reflection as most suggests itself to one who, while his spare shelves were filling with ( Agricultural journals,' and the works of Tull, Mills, Liebig, Johns- ton, and others ' of that ilk,' still kept an eye upon his Law-books. The evil of retarded and discouraged investment in the soil lies deep, and dates far back. It is not the fault of the Farmer : he is the subject, the time-grown and created result of the Legislation, and Custom with the force of legislation, that have made him what he is, and invested him with a stepmother relation to the soil. By the Law of primogeniture applied to Land alone of all other kinds of property and capital, you have set on foot in this country a system which has nearly reached its climax in the amassing and ag- gregation of land into the hands of few and large own- ers. The ancient yeoman, the owner of his own farm, is becoming or become an extinct genus animalium. By the enormous and factitious costliness, delay, and difficulty attending the Transfer of land, increasing in an inverse ratio with the acreage (for the relative cost of * title ' to an acre is beyond all comparison greater than that of a hundred, and of a hundred in like man- 238 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. ner to a thousand), you have secretly clenched and fortified the process which entail and primogeniture had openly avowed and established, and rendered it impossible, on the common principles of prudence or economy, for anyone to buy land (except for build- ing) otherwise than in large and increasingly larger quantities. The tendency is not stationary ; it is still going on. The man of small or moderate capital is becoming every day more and more effectually ousted from the possibility of ownership in ' the earth,' which * was made for all.' You point to France and Belgium, where there exists an opposite law compelling subdivision, with a still more evil tendency, if possible ; and talk about * political expediency,' and the mischief of * morcelle- ment.' But must we rush into one extreme to aviod the other ? or is our timid intelligence so scared that it cannot pause to distinguish between a tyranny which enforces subdivision, and that middle course which would allow Land, like every other form of capital, to adapt itself naturally to human need and circum- stance, and wholesomely to exist in great and small proportions ? Or is our political philosophy of such a school as to allow the supposition that we have the MORAL RIGHT to * capitalize' the earth, and disfran- CONCLUSION. 239 chise seventy-nine eightieths of the inhabitants of this country by * Act of Parliament,' and the ' Custom of Conveyancers ? ' [for it is authoratively said and there are no statistics to disprove it ! that the owners of land do not number above two hundred and fifty thousand, out of a population of twenty mil- lions !] Instead of the soil being, as it was meant to be, the first and best of Savings-banks for capitals of every size ; to the Peasant and the Yeoman, as well as the Duke and the Squire ; we assume the auda- cious office of readjusting natural and common rights, and pronounce for a system which agglomerates land into hands that may monopolize, but after all cannot themselves use it, and cut down the whole interest of the rest of the * agricultural community' to the rank and position of ' Tenant-farmers.' They do not, as a class, penetrate the meaning or the mischief of it : they are * to the manner born, ' and think it * all right' if they could only get * Tenant-right ; ' (as if the hirer of an article of limited supply, could have any 'right' but what the owner may choose to give him !) But then a LEASE ! What is the use of a Lease for the purpose of investment, unless it be of long duration ? Nay, it is often urged against leases, that 240 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. under a good landlord farms pass from father to son, and grandson, better without a lease than with one : then why not as property at once ? Why keep up the form and farce of ' ownership,' if its very excellence consist in a virtual surrender of its exercise, except to receive the * dividends ' half-yearly, under the name of ' Rent,' and pay annually for the ' repair ' of premises you never occupy ? Not that there are wanting many instances of improving Tenants and liberal Landlords. Thank Heaven, the worst laws are modified in practice by the common sense of mankind, as well as the best evaded by its ingenuity. It is the universal and unprofitable substitution of ' tenancy ' for ownership that is here spoken of, the territorial mapping of the country into dukeries and squiredoms, the im- pounding of the soil out of the action of free in- vestment, and the compression of its inviting and unexplored capabilities within the complicate tram- mels of a fiction, the fiction of an Owner that does not occupy, and an Occupier that does not own. Why should this be ? Why should Law, the instant it applies to Land, depart from its simplicity and even-handedness by making land, alone of all other forms of property and capital (that fall under CONCLUSION. 241 its occasional operation by intestacy or disputed right), an exception to the general rule of fair and equitable division ? In the freest of all free countries, where freedom is * the law of the land,' why should not * the land ' itself be free ? Why is it that so few will take the pains to understand the question enough to see that * primogeniture ' is a thing which families may make for themselves if they please, like heir- looms ; but which the Law has no more to do with than with the descent of my Lady's Jewels to the next ' my Lady,' though under the Statute of Distri- bution of the effects of Intestates they would be treated as personalty, and divided accordingly. Again and again be it understood, that it is not the compulsory division of land that is ad- vocated ; but simply the application to it of our own existing law applicable to every other form of capital, favouring neither its aggregation nor parti- tion, but leaving it to assume its natural proportions and relation to the wants and habits of society, like any other article in which Industry invests its savings. Wrap yourself in the triple armour of Custom, Pre- judice, or Feudalism, immoveable admirer of primo- geniture-by-Law ; but know that every great and accredited writer on national economics, from Adam R 242 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY Smith to John Stuart Mill, maintains the freedom of land from the feudal shackles of long entail and primogeniture-by-law, as the prime and fundamental rule of * Justice to society ' in the matter of the Soil. The change that we want is but little, but that little underlies and interpenetrates the whole economy of agriculture as a national business, and renders every acre uncultivated or half-cultivated through the operation of legal trammels upon the owner, a robbery upon the Labourer, the Capitalist, and ulti- mately on the public purse. It is the first and the most natural of Savings-banks to the humble, as well as of Investments to the wealthy capitalist. It is endowed with the most natural and versatile aptitude to the capabilities of both ; it belongs to the Spade as well as the Plough. It is evident as an instinct to every mind, and needs neither proof nor argument, that the soil is the * primest, eldest ' investment of our capital : to risk our national earnings and accu- mulations in any other channel till this field is first exhausted, is a course that men may indeed be driven to by the operation of foolish laws or customs, but which few, from either will or circumstance, would voluntarily choose. It needed no small ingenuity of folly, no small ( method in our madness,' to produce CONCLUSION. 243 that timidity and reluctance of investment in the soil which the disposable capital of this rich country ex- hibits. It is almost vain to argue against a feeling. Once make the cultivators of the soil/ee/, as a body, that in the Land itself they have really no interest beyond its annual produce, and you poison agriculture at its source. Shallow draining, shallow cultivation, shallow reckonings, and shallow knowledge of his business, are not naturally inherent in a man because he is a ' Tenant-farmer ; ' but in a country where the law (as happily with us) reigns supreme, an erro- neous law applied to the land may by degrees really make it come to appear so. And this has been the case with us : first, by the incessant recurrence of law ex- penses which our system involves, pressing with every form of costliness upon the soil, saddling every landed estate, in addition to the owner, the clergyman, the tenant, the labourer, and the poor, with the mainte- nance of its Lawyer, and secondly, by denying that last resource of inherited penury and embarrassed ownership, a free, speedy, and inexpensive mode of Transfer. The periodical ransacking which the musty muniments of an interminable 'Title' undergo to enable a few acres of land to change hands ; to say nothing of those momentous occasions, death and 244 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FARM. marriage, or the complete revision of the whole matter whenever a mortgage is required, form alto- gether a tribute of such oppressive magnitude, that Protection for the land from foreign competition is a dream indeed, compared to the reality of the much- desired Protection from ' Law.' To fully develope and expose the extent to which our antiquated system of Tenures, our long Entails strung with disconnected life-interests, our conflicting institution of * legal' and ' equitable ' estates, our prolix conveyances, and com- plicated settlements, operate as a charge upon the land, an impediment to its exchange, a reduction of its value, a drain upon the resources of the Owner, a secret injury to the Tenant and the Labourer would be to write the heaviest satire upon the struggle for Protection that has ever yet been showered upon a class powerful to achieve, if they only willed it, the completest satisfaction for the repeal of the Corn-laws which an important body could command or an intelligent community ap- prove. Do what you will for land, this lies at the bottom of, and completely surpasses in importance, all other ' Improvements.' Free the soil from the pesti- lent tyranny of parchment, that the obsolete necessi- ties and forms of centuries have gathered around it, CONCLUSION. 245 and more will be accomplished for its increase in commercial value, its preference as a field for invest- ment, its promotion of skill and invention, its contri- bution to the employment and the happiness of the greatest number, than all the mere physical improve- ments that could be enumerated or detailed, were every * Clay Farm ' in merry England to supply its ' Chronicle.' t-OWDON PBINTBD BY 8POTTISWOODE AHD CO. IfEW-STBEET SQVABE Sixth Edition, price 5s. 6d. T A L P A : OE THE CHRONICLES OE A CLAY EARM. With Twenty-four Illustrations by GEORGE CETTIKSHAITC. ' We shall learn of him another, and a greater lesson, some day.' BY C. W. H. Opinions of the Press. ' The book is as amusing as a novel.' ATHEN.XUM. 'The work will be read with interest and advantage by every class of agriculturists from the scientific experimentalist to the most obstinate stickler for primitive usages, who conducts the operations of husbandry in the system adopted by his great* grandfather.' NOBFOLK NEWS. ' C. W. H. is a magician at whose touch the hardest and most impracticable clods mellow down into the kindest and most friable of soils. No wonder that the same magical wand should have power to transmute a theme so barren and repulsive as a Clay Farm into one fraught with amusement and mental gratification.' FABMEBS' HERALD. ' To find so much practical truth, conveyed with such brilliancy of fancy and literary power, is somewhat unusual in agricultural literature, but we have scarcely ever seen a more successful illustration of the author's motto from Horace of telling the truth in a laughing way. ... It will soon attain, as it deserves, a very high degree of popularity.' CALEDONIAN MEBCUK v. Talpa, by C. WREN HOSKYNS. This is a rate little volume. We don't know which to admire most, the author's humour or his wisdom. He has set himself the task of illustrating, in an agreeable manner, the Evils of Custom, Prejudice, and Feudalism, as they exist among agricul- turists. It will create much laughter among the merry, and convey many a lesson to the tiller of the soil. There are some very capital illustrations, too, embellishing the volume.' ERA. The writer handles his subject in such a masterly manner his style is BO piquant, as well as forcible; so scholarly, yet so racy his wit and his wisdom are so skilfully blended he has so cleverly worked out his motto, Ridentem aicere verum, by telling the truth laughingly that the reader finds himself irresistibly carried along, and he and the book part not company until he has made himself master of the tale that he lias to unfold. LEICESTERSHIRE MEBCUBY. ' The author of Talpa has elicited humour, wisdom, and we had almost said ro- mance, out of a clay farm. In what superficially appears the most unpromising and unfertile of themes, he has found materials for a volume of such interesting and sug- gestive matter as has seldom been written about agriculture. The general reader will find much useful information from The Chronicles of a Clay Farm, which combines, with all the interest of a modern novel, practical lessons of the first importance.' HEBTFOED MEBCUBT. 'Our agricultural readers will no doubt be surprised to learn that the soundest lessons in agricultural science, and yet one of the most amusing books ever published, will be found with the above title ; but it is nevertheless true. . . . We tell the truth when we say that Cruikshank has illustrated this work in his best style, yet the illustrations are hardly so humorous as the letter-press. Pleasantry, when in good taste, is an admirable set-off to a dull subject; but when it is accompanied, as in Talpa, with new and startling speculations, which are so clearly defined, and bear so strong an appearance of truth, that they captivate every reader, we must confess that a good work has been accomplished.' LITEBPOOL STANDARD. By the same Author. In October 1865 will be published, OCCASIONAL ESSAYS. CONTENTS. The Invisible World, or the Occult Powers of Creation. The Domain of Physical Inquiry : an Address to the Warwickshire Natural History Society. On Agriculture, its Eise and Progress in Great Britain. The English Landowner. The Battle Line of History, or the Influence of Battles on Human Progress. London : LONG-MANS, GEE EN, and CO. Paternoster Eow. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. a L9-42m-8,'49 (B5573)444 loskyns - Talpa S521 H?9t 1865 411 I ram