the parent of the Laval, Lefeldt, Petersen, and other varieties of the separator. Improved by successive developments, it can now be purchased at a third of its former cost. In its wake have followed a variety of improved appliances-churns to suit every fancy, milktesters, milk-coolers, centrifugal butter driers, butter workers, butter hardeners, steel pails, tin-lined utensils, down to greaseproof paper, and chip or paper boxes for marketing the produce. In recent years an effort has also been made to compete with the soft cheeses of foreign countries. Excellent cheeses of the type of Brie, Camembert, and Gervais are now produced by English dairies. If there is a weak side to all this progress, it lies in the fact that the processes of butter and cheese-making are becoming too elaborate and scientific for the ordinary run of agriculturists. There is certainly some risk that this branch of the farming industry may become confined to creameries and associations, and that wholesale dealers may refuse the products which have not come from a factory.

In the science and practice of the various branches of farming, progress has been great, and it has been helped by a corresponding increase in the means of obtaining agricultural education. Throughout the country numerous centres have been established in addition to those previously in existence. Aspatria (1874), Downton (1880), the University College of North Wales (1884), followed by colleges, schools and institutes in South Wales, Kent, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Shropshire, and other counties, at Cambridge, Reading, Penrith, Swanley, Uckfield, Chelmsford, and elsewhere, the Armstrong College at Newcastle-on-Tyne, the Cheshire Agricultural and Horticultural Institute, the Harris Institute at Preston, the Eastern Counties Dairy Institute at Ipswich, the National Fruit and Cider Institute at Bristol, and similar institutions in various parts of England, offer new opportunities of practical and scientific training to future landlords, farmers, and land-agents. At many of these centres, degrees or certificates can be obtained. Examinations for National diplomas are conducted by the Royal and Highland Agricultural Societies. The admirable leaflets issued by the Board of Agriculture supply the latest scientific discoveries in the shortest compass, either free or at the smallest possible cost. In local expenditure on technical education, instruction in agricultural subjects is represented, and the range of the lectures and classes organised by County Councils continues to extend. Instruction in forestry is

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given at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, at the University of North Wales, the Armstrong College, and in the Public Department of Woods and Forests in Alice Holt Woods and the Forest of Dean. Considerable sums are also expended by the Boards of Education and of Agriculture in subvention to colleges and institutes, and for the furtherance of agricultural training.

Education on a scale so varied and extensive must in the long run produce results. Already its effect is visible. Unfortunately, for the children of agricultural labourers little or nothing is done which does not unfit them for their fathers' industry. They cannot afford to attend Colleges or Institutes. Continuation and night schools do not begin till the mischief is really done. What is most wanted is some form of elementary instruction in rural schools adapted to the needs of agriculturists. The problem is admittedly difficult. Teachers, as a rule, are not interested in country life. Here and there, an individual may succeed in implanting his own rural enthusiasms in his pupils. Text-books adapted to the surroundings of country children may prove a help. But the practical training is still wanting. School gardens are a step in the right direction. Rightly or wrongly, no effort has been made to imitate the continental practice of closing rural schools from hay-time to harvest, and lengthening the winter hours. Whether some more suitable system of elementary rural education might not have helped to check rural depopulation may be an open question. School influences alone can never attract young persons to remain on the land. But at present they rather promote than discourage migration into towns, and farmers not unnaturally grudge the growing expenditure on an education which assists in making rural labour at once more scarce and less efficient. Elementary education may not always produce this effect. In its present stage of transition, its disturbing influences are increased by the conditions of rural homes. The younger generation is better educated than the old, and both are conscious of the fact. This sense of disparity fosters in the children a distaste for village life, and in the parents a desire that the superior attainments of their children should have wider opportunities than they themselves enjoyed. In another generation, the disparity will have disappeared; the atmosphere of the home will have become, it may be hoped, more educated. At this later stage of its development, education may tend rather to contentment than to discontent. It may in itself supply those fresh

and enduring sources of interest which make light of external conditions. If this ever becomes the influence of elementary education, it may help to repeople the country districts which it now tends to depopulate.

The general record of English farming during the last seventy years is a legitimate source of pride to all who have contributed to its advance. It shows a marvellous progress in every department of agriculture, effected in the face of heavy sacrifices and innumerable difficulties. High farming has lost the buoyancy and enthusiasm of youth; its later years were soured by losses and disappointments; to-day, in spite of improved conditions, it views the future with alarm. Whatever the future may have in store, it has made landlords and tenants better equipped to profit by prosperity or to combat misfortune than they have been at any previous period of history.

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CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUSION.

1888 and 1912: political agitation then and now; the situation contrasted and compared; the position of landowners; of titheowners; of tenantfarmers; tenant-right as a defence against sales; agricultural labourers, their slow progress between 1834 and 1884, and their Unions; their improved position in 1912. The problem of the future; the reconstruction of village life: the necessity of an agricultural policy: the prospect of increased burdens on agricultural land.

MANY persons cannot conceive it possible that, even in this century of rapid changes, any serious alterations in the existing systems of the tenure and cultivation of English land are really imminent. To them it seems incredible that English farming can be destined, on any extensive scale, to revert towards conditions out of which it finally emerged in the Victorian era. They may be right or wrong in their views. On that point no opinion need be here expressed. The task of sketching the story of "English farming past and present" ends with the present day. Conjectures as to the future of farming, or programmes for its reconstruction, belong rather to prophets and politicians than to chroniclers. Yet the existing conditions of farming are already disturbed by anticipations, whether true or false, of coming change. In order to complete the sketch of English farming down to 1912, it is, therefore, necessary to attempt a summary of the present position of landlords, tenants, and labourers.

By way of contrast or comparison, four passages may be quoted from the first edition of this book, published 24 years ago under the title of The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming. At the time when the book appeared, agriculture was still suffering from severe depression. It was a middle period between the disasters of 18741885 and those of 1891-1899. Some signs of revival had appeared; but the outlook alike for landowners, tenants, and labourers was still gloomy.

Many landlords had succeeded to estates which were heavily encumbered by settlements, charges and mortgages, laid on in more prosperous times. They could not dispose of their property, for land was a drug in the market; rates and taxes swallowed up the residue of the rents which was left from interest and charges; the so-called owner had become a conduit pipe between his tenants on the one side, and, on the other, his family, the mortgagees, ratecollectors, and tax-gatherers. Anyone who lived in the country at that period can call to mind numerous families who had curtailed their expenditure, cut down their establishments, let or closed their houses, or become absentees on the continent. Among farmers, arrears, bills of sale, liquidations, bankruptcies kept ever in advance of reductions and remissions of rent. Their numbers diminished.1 Many were farming as bailiffs instead of as tenants, or were applicants for relief from the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution. Of those who remained in occupation, the most capable men, who were wide awake to every chance of profit, kept the master's eye upon their business, and in personal expenses had cut their coats to their cloth, were making farming pay; but the majority were paying rent out of capital and holding on by their eyelids in hopes of better times. Labourers, as the area of corn-growing dwindled, and the labour-bill was reduced to a minimum, found employment hard to get and hard to keep thrown out of work, or half employed, they crowded into the towns where their El Dorado proved to be the workhouse or worse. The landowner's expendable income was little or nothing, the farmer's fixed rent an improvident speculation, the labourer's wage uncertain and precarious.

Conditions were favourable for violent change. For the moment the relations between landlord and tenant were embittered. Labourers, smarting under the recent defeat of their Unions, were hostile. In every direction political agitators were active. Insecurity paralysed recovery; it rendered chronic the collapse which disastrous seasons and foreign competition had produced. Many of the ideas and theories of advanced reformers in 1888 differed little from those of 1912; in language only have they become more precise or definite. "Crude panaceas are in vogue at the present day; wild theories are promulgated for the redistribution of English land. In the days of her commercial and agricultural supremacy, England might safely ignore such demands for change. An ever-increasing 1 See Appendix VII. "Census Returns of the Agricultural Population."