renewed soil. Till we obtain either the knowledge or a pause in the growing we may expect an annual disappointment: for we do at least know that there is some cause which appears to be permanent.
We hear other roots ill spoken of this year. That mangold should fail is a serious misfortune to cattle and their owners. The failure is certainly not universal, though by all accounts it must be very wide spread. I know of some which grew rather patchy after the drought, but has had no drawback since, and promises to be fine. Two causes are assigned for such failure as there is. The seed from last year’s crop was not properly ripened, and very improperly mixed with the weeds which flourished so rankly; and a new maggot has been feasting itself in the inside of the leafstalks, destroying the plant in the most insidious way. Carrots have failed from bad seed: and turnips, which up to a late date promised well, come out badly from examination,—the roots having run to “fingers and toes,” as the country folk say. Beans are bad; peas fine. So say the majority of reporters; but there is scarcely any assertion about any crop which is not matched with a precisely opposite account from some part of the country. The only general statement which can be relied on is that, on the whole, light lands and their produce have done well, and clay lands and their crops less well than on the average.
Our fortune is therefore moderately good only, in regard to the produce of the country this year. The year has, however, done much to improve our prospect in time to come.
First, we have got a Drainage Bill, which, if made the most of, will effect much towards that Arterial Drainage which is now the chief want of British agriculture. The bill went so quietly through parliament that it may be doubted whether there is as yet any due appreciation of the powers which it gives. Under it, the energetic portion of the proprietors of any district needing drainage can effect their object by application to the Enclosure Commissioners, through whose intervention they can obtain a private Act of Parliament in an inexpensive, ready, and secure manner. No obstructive neighbour need now be allowed to spoil land, and ruin health, and fill the churchyard, by forbidding the waters to pass his property. We cannot expect to have everything on the first asking; and this bill does not give us a systematic emendation of our watercourses, from their spring-heads in the hills to their outfall into the sea: but it enables private enterprise to improve large areas by effectual drainage; and it removes the antique and vexatious impediments by which the welfare of the many, living above and below, has been sacrificed to the selfishness or ignorance of some one proprietor, or some clique of gentry, strong in will, who would not listen to reason. It will not now be the fault of the law if we suffer hereafter as we have suffered till now from floods in critical seasons, and bogged land all the year round, for want of efficient watercourses. We ought to see, for years to come, a great straightening, and clearing, and deepening of the channels of our streams,—a great strengthening of the banks,—a great substitution of steam for water-mills, and consequent abolition of weirs,—each spoiling more land than any mill can be worth.
This Drainage Act is one great gain of this year. Another is the prodigious extension of the use of agricultural machinery. There is nothing like bad weather for convincing husbandmen of the benefit of machinery which saves time. The lesson of last November, with its brief seeding-time, has shown its effects in the wide adoption of almost every kind of new and approved implement. One appears, to be stared at, here and there in the most old-fashioned corners of the island; while, in the neighbourhood of the great manufacturing towns, some costly instrument is seen on its journey to a field, hired by a party of allotment-holders, to mow, or reap, or plough, or sow quickly for them, at their joint expense.
The phenomena of rural labour are becoming more remarkable every year. The faster the use of machinery spreads, the more deficient does labour become. We hear suggestions of letting soldiers be employed in harvest-labour, and the few able-bodied inmates of workhouses. We hear with satisfaction of emigrants returning from America, since the civil war there began. The Irish who come over for haymaking and harvest are fewer and fewer; and if any of them are found begging, it is because they have come to a district where their work is better done by modern methods. When we obtain the system of returns of agricultural statistics, which cannot be much longer withheld by the prejudices of the less instructed class of farmers, there will presently be no spare labour anywhere, because it will be evenly distributed; and the total amount is already insufficient for our needs,—great as is the amount of work saved by machinery. Where agriculture is most advanced labour is most readily absorbed, and best paid.
The failure of the mangold this year has directed attention towards a mistake which has been admirably exposed in France, where the error has been greater than with us. While growing desperate under the ravages of insects, we have been destroying their natural enemies, the small birds. Several agricultural societies in France have been petitioning the legislature to protect the small birds which the peasantry destroy for food,—causing the devastation of whole acres of grain and roots for the sake of half-a-dozen bird-pies. Our cottagers do not feed on robins and sparrows; but too many people kill the small birds because they destroy sprouting vegetables, and help themselves to the food of the poultry. Then we hear dismal tales of the wireworm, and the maggot which has been so fatal to the mangold this year. The discussion about the wireworm, and various aphides, and the grub of the cockchafer bids fair to preserve the races of small birds in this country, and to restore them in France. It promises, moreover, to restrict the meddling of game-preservers within due bounds. They have destroyed owls, weasels, and polecats in such numbers as to have increased the rats and mice beyond all endurable bounds,—injuring hedges and ditches, and ravaging crops till the mischief is seen, in bad seasons, in its full enormity.
In France, the deficient crops are avowedly owing, to no small extent, to the unchecked
