Fruit is the text I take, because fruit is at once the worst example, and the most obvious one. But in no branch of agriculture is there anything approaching to modern scientific farming. Wheat-farming represents the crown of agricultural achievement in England, and very good yields per acre are garnered, because the tillage is careful, the manuring generous, the climate favourable. But what gross waste of labour is involved in the cultivation of these tiny fields, laboriously ploughed, in many instances with a single furrow plough; sown by hand and often reaped, yes reaped, with scythe-men and picturesque but unthrifty gathering of haymakers!
But there is this to be said for the old-fashioned English agriculture, that it is very, very picturesque. The tiny hedge-divided fields, the orchards in which the trees grow to forest dimensions, are far more pleasing to the eye than the great, bare, wire-fence-divided wheat-fields of Canada and Australia; or their orchards with close-clipped trees kept working with all their might for a living and not allowed the luxury of a single vagrant branch or the sight of any green carpet of grass beneath. And, withal, in England, farming is not a commercial speculation altogether. If it relied upon its commercial success, it would die out almost completely. But the old landholders love their estates: the newly rich, if they are of the English spirit, aspire to become landholders. Both are usually content if from their agricultural estates they are able to make the products pay a slight profit only.
HARVESTING IN HEREFORDSHIRE
The area under tillage shows, therefore, a tendency to dwindle, though already it is very small, considering the thick population of the country. Love of sport and love of seeing the woods in their wild state have always set apart a great area of England for forest and for game preserve. Nowadays we do not make a deer forest as roughly as did William the Conqueror the New Forest for the sake of the deer "whom he loved as if he had been their father." But somehow land passes out of cultivation to become moorland or forest. These "waste lands" are far from being useless, however. They graze ponies and cows; they are deer forests, grouse moors, pheasant preserves, golf links. Land is more valuable for sport than for agriculture, and therefore it drifts to the use of sport, and peasants make way for pheasants.
A fine track of oak forest has been left at the Forest of Dean near the borders of Wales—the finest forest tract probably in England. It is a wild tract of steep hills covered with oaks, used for the building of the Navy in the days before the wooden walls had given way to steel ramparts.
The fen areas alone are in course of reclamation from the wild to the cultivated state. The work of bringing them back to usefulness was begun under Charles I. by Dutch engineers. Now a great part of the old fen lands are good productive meadows bounded by a network of dykes and drains, from which the surplus of water is pumped into the channels of the Ouse and other rivers, and so finds its way to the North Sea. Like the similar land of Holland, these reclaimed fens are excellent for the culture of bulbs, and Lincolnshire has made quite an industry of sending narcissi to the London market.
Considering the Englishman at his work in other capacities, he is iron-founder, pottery-maker, textile-weaver, miner, and of course sailor and merchant. His work is characterised by a great solidness and honesty. There is not much "gimcrack" work turned out in England. The spirit of her workshops is to make things that will last, not short-life tools and machines, such as some other peoples love. Indeed they do say that the idols made at Birmingham—a large proportion of the idols for the heathens of the world are made at Birmingham—are made so solidly as to suggest that the manufacturers have grave doubts about Paganism being supplanted among their customers for some generations.
Occasionally, indeed, one is tempted to believe that the Englishman loves work for work's own sake. I concluded this on first landing at Liverpool, when it took an hour's effort, on an average, for each passenger from the mail steamer to sort out his luggage. At Euston at least another half-hour was wasted in the same way. All that might have been avoided by a luggage check system such as prevails in Australia, America, and other countries. But evidently the English character for steady energy and stolid good humour is built up partly by following the sport of luggage-hunting.