(6)
Want of knowledge is loss of power, and the farmer will not supply any if he can help it, or aid in forging a weapon that may be used against himself. Moreover, the farmer is not a sanguine creature. He sees the fatal effect of a hlight- iog wind or a withering drought upon his crops, and he reck- ons nothing of the revivifying powers of nature. He sees his field producing ten bushels when it should produce fifteen, and, therefore, when he speaks to you, he extenuates and hides. The greatest out-turn may represent his hopes,_ but the least represents hia fears and he will not tell you his hopes ; and farther, he is superstitious, and does does not like to speculate on the much or the little that Providence has designed for him.
13 The Settlement Officer, then, has hard work of it, and probably has no farming experience of so^B***"* his own to fall back on. He does not know
the actual powers of the soil. He gath- ers results, whether they be in kind or in money, and he applies all the influences that he knows have effect on these results, and then he generalizes, but, “ dohis latet in generalihus”, and by enquiries he reduces the deceit to the lowest point he can.
14. I will try and explain the principles held by both
Principles empioyediTithe the officcTS I have named, in making Bssessment oi the district. their assessments.
Mr. Capper expressed the great difficulty there was in makingafield-to-field assessment. He said, “a's to the moans of ascertaining the gross retal, I have heard much and thought much of the various plans obtaining with other Settlement “ Officers, and am inclined to think that no Officer has time, “ and few knowledge, sufficient to make a field-to-field assess- “ ment. The amins’ returns being found generally correct, the “ officer, by visiting the village, is able roughly to classify them “without himself doing over again the work already done for “him by an expensive machinery.”
15. He then referred to the difficulty of finding the rent
a particular field at all; for that the engagement m^e with a cultivator, as a rule, referred to a man’s entire holding ; and continued, “ I Bates. “ thmk it easy to strike a rough average,
according to the classes of soil, on the ^ area of each village in the c^^, when the causes of any great discrep^cy can be separately enquired into, and errors
