It is related of Ruskin that, hearing the insistent rattle of a mowing machine in a meadow adjoining his home by the beautiful Coniston Water, and his sense of the fitting being outraged, he interviewed the owner, and, by an offer to pay the trifling difference between machine and hand labour, induced him to discontinue the annoyance.
As to the relative cost of machine and hand wheat-cutting, quite early in my farming I obtained the opinion of a distinguished farmer, then well known on the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society, Mr. Charles Randell, of Chadbury, near Evesham, on the subject: "If you can get a good crop," he said, "cut, tied, and stocked by hand at anything like 15s. an acre, don't use a machine. If the corn is ripe it knocks out and wastes quite a bushel of wheat per acre" (worth at that time about 5s., now nearer 9s. or 10s.). "I always bring out my machines, and have them oiled and made ready, but I don't want to use them."
In a wet harvest the machine is unworkable on sticky clay soil, and after a wet summer, when the corn is badly laid and twisted, it makes very poor work, cutting off the ears and scattering them, and leaving a quantity of uncut and untidy straw on the ground.
In my own case my equanimity was never disturbed by a reaping machine, with its unwieldy tossing arms, on my land, for I had to find employment for my full staff of regular hands, specially required for the much more important hop-picking a little later, and it pleased me that they should get the extra pay for harvest work as well.
The cream separator, I admit, is a wonderful invention, and its hum is not unmusical; it provides fresh skim milk for the calves and pigs morning and night, which, as well as the cream, is thoroughly cleansed in the process. The aeration of the skim milk leaves it a most wholesome and nourishing article of diet for the villagers if they could be made to understand its value, and that the removal of the cream takes away only the fat (heating material), leaving the bone and muscle making constituents in the milk. I could never induce my village folk to accept this rudimentary proposition; they fancied that all the goodness was gone with the cream, and though I offered the skim milk at the nominal price of one halfpenny a quart, very few would send their children to fetch it, though they mostly lived within a hundred yards of the dairy.
The hay or straw elevator is one of the greatest helps, saving much heavy overhand labour in rick-building. An old labourer, pointing to one, with great appreciation, on a farm I was visiting, said: "That's a machine as will be always kept in the dry and took care on." He spoke from experience of the arduous work of unloading and the passing of heavy weights, sometimes from the bed of the waggon to the summit of the rick; for, as my bailiff often said, "Nobody knows so well where the shoe pinches as the man who has to wear it."
Steam has not done all that was expected of it as an agricultural slave. The steam plough is not a success on heavy land where the ridges are high and irregular in width, and even the steam cultivator has to be used with caution lest the soil should be carried from the ridges to the furrows, and the "squitch" (couch) buried to a depth at which it is difficult to eradicate. The great convenience of steam cultivation is that full advantage can be taken of a short spell of hot, dry weather for fallowing operations, and the soil is left so hollow that it soon bakes and kills the weeds. I fully sympathize with Tennyson's, Northern Farmer, Old Style:
"But summon 'ull come ater meä mayhap wi' 'is kittle o' steäm
Huzzin' an' maäzin' the blessed feälds wi' the Devil's oän teäm";
for, except on a large farm with immense fields, the ponderous and ungainly steam, tackle gives one a sensation of intrusion. Such a field can be found on a farm between Evesham and Alcester; it contains 300 acres. The occupier, speaking of it, mentioned that it was all wheat that year except one corner. To a question as to the size of the corner, it transpired that it was 50 acres, and growing peas. For comparison there is a story of a Devonshire farmer who said he had been very busy one winter making four fields into one. "Then you've got a big field," said a friend. "Yes," was the reply; "it's just four acres."
When the farm labourer was enfranchised in 1885 he became an important member of the electorate. Candidates and canvassers alike had a much more strenuous time than ever before, the former were constrained to hold meetings in every village, and the latter were obliged to visit nearly every cottage. The late Sir Richard Temple after a distinguished career in India, became Conservative candidate for our division. The doctrine of "three acres and a cow," in opposition to every tenet of rural economy, as well as the division of the land among the labourers, were at the time paraded by theorists and paid agitators, as bribes to purchase the votes of the new electors, and as ensuring the salvation of the rural population, which was then beginning to suffer from unemployment, resulting from the destruction of corn-growing by foreign competition.