anticipation to the greater part of society. The mention of it in the King’s speech was considered a mere form, like the assurance we hear repeated every winter, that we are in a state of amity with foreign powers. The farmers’ complaints really were constant. If the harvest was bad, they pointed to the ruin caused by rain, or drought; saying nothing of the compensation they derived from the artificial high prices under the sliding-scale: and if the harvest was plentiful, they groaned over the low price of corn. So, the farmers’ complaints went for nothing with society generally. When bread was dear, the middle classes felt the misfortune; and so, above all, did the artisan classes. The rural labourers were fed from the rates, and were kept so low always that the character of the harvest made little difference to them. Scarcely a year passed without applications to parliament about agricultural distress, so that the evil seemed to be a necessary and interminable one; and people turned from it in hopelessness. They did not seek to know beforehand what the harvest was likely to be in any year; and when the point was settled, they had nothing to say to it but to lament or rejoice over dear or cheap bread, without looking further than their own account-book and baker’s shop. The wide range of ideas which millions of minds now run over when the mention of the coming or past harvest occurs, was not then opened to the many. It is not very many years ago (I think it was shortly before the repeal of the corn laws), that I heard a clergyman, kind-hearted and active-minded, and the son of a bishop, say with a smile of complacency, that he was not troubled by the menace of a ruined harvest.
“We hear the same thing every few years,” he observed; “and you know there always is a harvest.”
“Yes,—for you,” I replied.
I took leave to tell him that his remark was unbecoming a clergyman; for the moral condition of the people is the clergyman’s first business: and if he did not know, he ought to have known, that a bad harvest meant increase of crime, as well as infliction of misery. In later times, when I have observed the general understanding established throughout the nation, in regard to the common interest in a good harvest, and the precise bearings of the fact, the self-satisfied composure of that well-meaning clergyman (which he mistook for piety) has recurred to me, with undiminished surprise that within twenty years such insensibility should have prevailed on such a subject.
The last and present year furnish a capital test of our improved knowledge and sense, as well as our improved circumstances. If ever there was a dreary year for farmers it was 1860; and it followed a sufficiently trying one in 1859. Yet we hear nothing of the grumbling of the farmers. They are no longer thought bores, or worse, as a class favoured by the laws and the aristocracy, and yet never contented. The invidious favour is gone; and with it everything that was unmanly in the character of the order. Their business is no longer a lottery, as the corn laws and our agricultural ignorance made it till fifteen years ago. Farmers have now to seek their fortunes as other men of business do,—by relying on their own sense, knowledge, and industry; and they have already arrived at being able largely to control or counteract the caprices of the weather, which were their plea formerly for taxing all bread-eaters, to save bread-growers from loss. I do not know how it strikes less old-fashioned people, but I own that nothing has been more impressive to me during these two remarkable years, than the dignified bearing of the farmers of the country. They have had serious losses to bear; and something worse than other classes have to endure in sustaining losses. A merchant is subject to bad debts and unfortunate issues to speculations: but the loss comes, as it were, in a lump. A certain portion of his property is gone; and his expectations are mortified. The farmer has to endure the protracted trial of seeing his property go; and his mortifications, in a bad year, are drawn out from day to day, till the seasons have run their round. What the trial is can hardly be conceived by dwellers in towns, to whom the result comes in the dear loaf, and the beef and mutton at 10d. or 1s. the lb. Where I sit, and look abroad over a rural scene, it is much easier to sympathise with the farmer. There are the fields into which no seed could be got last autumn before the frosts came. In yonder homesteads and cottages, the labourers sat round the fire for weeks after Christmas, till the women were heartily tired of their being always in the way: but they had nothing to do out of doors; and the farmers saw all their possessions locked up, as it were, from their natural uses. For a few weeks in February and March everybody was busy, and the proprietors of land and stock more hopeful. They would have no autumn sown crops; but they must make the most of the spring; and the hard and prolonged frost had benefited the soil, and must have destroyed much vermin. If the spring grasses did but turn out well, it might be a fair year yet. But then came the drought. In our part of the island it rained only three or four times between Easter and July. Day after day the farmer looked in vain for the growth of his grass. It did not seem to grow at all. April, May, and even June passed on, and the hill sides showed no tinge of the vivid green which signals the herds and flocks to the upland pastures. Buying and buying, all through the spring, to feed the beasts who ought to be grazing,—each week hoping for rain and green grass, and none coming,—this is a trial of patience. The cereals came up thin and straggling, and withered more and more under the drought: and the grass in the hayfields was thinly in flower, while the undergrowth remained stationary. At last, when all resources for feeding the cattle were about exhausted, the rain came. Everybody cheered up. The cereal crops might yet make up for lost time, or quality might compensate for quantity: and as for the hay,—it must be in part seeded grass, and in part too short; but there would be a crop by waiting three weeks for it. But it so happened that the rain, having once arrived, scarcely stopped; and it was so heavy as to be very mischievous. Where light and poor hay crops were got in at
