1814.
Bushels Wheat
per Acre.
Mr E. Wakefield, Devonshire, improved husbandry,24
Mr J. Bennet, Wiltshire, do.,24
Mr J. Bailey, Northumberland, rent £2 per acre,30
Mr Brodie, East-Lothian,32
Mr Turnbull, do.,30
Produce of five acres,140
On an average of years previous to 1848.
Mr Watson, Forfarshire,32
Mr Dudgeon, Roxburghshire,33
Mr Roberton, do.,33
Mr Sadler, Mid-Lothian,32
Mr Gibson, do.,32
162
140
22

That is, the farmers quoted by Blackwood have on an average of good and bad years, on average land, been growing nearly 4½ bushels wheat more per acre, than the farmers, on the most fertile soils in the country, quoted in the Parliamentary Report of 1814. It is quite true that Messrs Brodie and Turnbull grow more oats and barley per acre than Messrs Watson and Dudgeon, on their average of years; and, you might have added, more than Mr M'Culloch did with his boasted high farming in the abundant crop of 1849. You say that the figures of Messrs Brodie and Turnbull give "their average produce for a series of years, and elaborate extracts from their books are adduced to corroborate them," (p. 14.) Now, in giving his evidence, Mr Brodie pointedly states that he had taken his farm "two years ago;" and therefore it could not be "for a series of years" that he gave the average produce of his farms. Mr Brodie produced no extracts from his books, and altogether you misstate his case. Mr Turnbull's evidence is more copious. To the question—"What is your course of cropping?" his answer is—"My heavy land in a rotation of six—remainder, of about 80 acres, is in a rotation of four; 334 acres are under the plough; the remainder (20 acres) always in grass." And he describes his six-shift course, which applies to 250 acres of the whole arable land, to be—"Fallow, wheat, grass, oats, beans, and wheat." Mr Turnbull did grow more corn crops than Messrs Watson and Dudgeon; but you forget to tell your reader that, during your "cycle of thirty years," he had three-fourths of his farm, for five several years, in fallow, absolutely barren, and not producing a mouthful of bread or anything else, for the people. If the loss incurred during these five years of bare fallow is considered, and if regard is had not only to cereal produce, but to the cattle grown and fed on their pasturage, it may be safely concluded that Messrs Watson and Dudgeon are at least as large benefactors, in supplying food to the people from inferior soils, as Messrs Brodie and Turnbull were, on the very best lands in Scotland. You seem to fancy, because Mr Brodie valued his clover at £6, 6s. per acre, and his turnips at from £8 to £10 per acre, that, in the department of stock, he greatly excelled Messrs Watson and Dudgeon. You forget, again, to tell your reader that it was the Scotch acre that Mr Brodie spoke of: was this accident or ignorance? If this error is corrected, and if the exorbitant prices of butcher-meat at the period referred to are remembered, the value of the green crop, as assumed by Mr Brodie, will surprise no one.

Your whole case is based upon a garbled and partial collation of the evidence taken by Parliament; and independently of this, you totally misconceive and misinterpret the case, as quoted by you. The two farms referred to by you are about the very best in North Britain. Nor is this all: they were among the earliest and oldest cultivated soils in Scotland, according to the improved methods of husbandry then in practice. Previous to 1814, they were let at three times the rent of Keillor or Spylaw. There is a point beyond which you cannot raise the productiveness of the soil—when it revolts, and visits your avarice with sharp reprisals. This you admit in your first pamphlet, (p. 17.) The real question is this, had not Messrs Brodie and Turnbull raised the productive powers of their farms nearly or altogether to the maximum of the soil's fertility?—or, as you say, could they have insured a larger bulk of crop without the danger of lodging it? In the articles of barley and oats, most unquestionably they could not. Mr Brodie grew 48 bushels barley, and 57 bushels oats, per imperial acre; and Mr Turnbull 45 bushels barley, and 54 bushels oats, per imperial acre. On the very best soils, and by any kind of culture, and with as large an application of manure as you please, I defy you to grow, on an average of years, larger quantities than these.

Look now at the farms with which you compare Messrs Brodie's and Turnbull's. Take Spylaw. Previous to 1814, that farm was well-nigh in a state of primitive sterility: although ploughed, it was a quagmire; and the agriculture was what you poetically call according to "nature, which has no rotation of crops." Mr Dudgeon entered on the farm in 1824; and since that time he has doubled the produce of the grain, and quadrupled the quantity of the stock. Call you this nothing, young man!—nothing in the way of providing food for the million? Since 1814 or 1824, has the produce of grain been doubled, and the quantity of stock quadrupled, on the farms of Messrs Brodie and Turnbull? Nay, has there been any perceptible advance in the quantity of grain grown? Has the produce of the grain not remained stationary—and not from any want of skill or enterprise upon the part of the farmer, but simply because the soil, previous to 1814, had about reached the limit of its productiveness? By an enormous outlay, and by admirable skill and management, Mr Dudgeon has thus raised the productive powers of a soil naturally of a very inferior description—and not in abundant seasons, but on an average of years—up very nearly to the highest mark of the best land in the kingdom previous to 1814. The very same, I have no doubt, is the history of the agricultural progress that has taken place upon Mr Watson's farm; and, on the question of agricultural progress generally, the evidence, fortunately, is accessible to all inquirers. The volume of the Farmer's Magazine for 1814, which you refer to, might have instructed you on this subject. An apparently well-qualified writer in that volume, states "22½ bushels wheat per acre as a high enough average for clay land in the best cultivated counties of Scotland," (p. 151.)

Your contrasting two of the choicest farms in all Scotland with the average soil of Forfarshire and Roxburghshire, indicates a want of fairness, and destroys the value of your criterion. Intending to depreciate, you unwittingly have pronounced a panegyric on the farming of Messrs Watson and Dudgeon. You have the hardihood to say, "that the annual produce reaped by Messrs Watson and Dudgeon has actually fallen off nearly a third from what it was in the days of their grandfathers!" This is a ridiculous blunder, and we have seen that your whole speculation on this subject is constructed on a series of wild errors, and illustrated by a Gothic ignorance of the past history of Scotch husbandry. Your poor taunt recoils upon yourself.

In summing up results, you tell us "that Mr Watson, at present prices, derives a gross return of £920 from 340 acres under wheat, grass, and turnips. Mr Dudgeon has £1087, 10s. from 360 acres under the same crops. And Mr M'Culloch has £1369, 16s. from 146 acres," (p. 17.) Now, supposing the hypothetical balance-sheet is to be received into court, there yet lurks under this summary a gross misstatement. Mr M'Culloch had no such return from his wheat, grass, and turnips on the 146 acres: £284 was expended for purchased food for the stock, and this contributed largely to the result, but reduces the return from the 146 acres to £1065, 16s. As well might the distiller who rents 40 acres, but who annually fattens hundreds of cattle upon the feeding stuffs furnished by his distillery, put down the immense sum of profit received from his cattle, as the return from the portion of the 40 acres under wheat, grass, and turnips. The error may be unintentional, but a more loose or fallacious statement of the fact is scarcely conceivable. You are guilty of a similar dereliction in p. 43, where you say that Mr Christopher, "from 270 acres under grass and green crops, derived under Protection a return in money of £710, much less than Mr M'Culloch's return under Free Trade from 91 acres of grass and green crop." In fact, Mr M'Culloch's return from the 91 acres may be, (for it is not realised,) £600.

In this veracious fashion you illustrate the "results of high farming under Free Trade, and ordinary farming under Protection." A most extraordinary simpleton will he be who receives without hesitation the Auchness balance-sheet, and your rose-coloured illustrations of high farming. "What would have been the position," you ask, "of the country, if the food of the people had depended exclusively on such exertions as those of Messrs Dudgeon, Watson, and Low? By their rules, the half of the population ought to have been starved long ago; and if the produce of the country has in any degree kept pace with the increase of its population, we are not indebted for it to them," (p. 16.) To whom, then, are you indebted? Not to the Auchness husbandry, which is a prodigy of yesterday's growth—not to Mr M'Culloch and his attendant satellite; for it is only six months since these luminaries appeared in the western hemisphere. You are indebted, and could be indebted, for the result, to no other parties but Blackwood's farmers and their contemporaries. The people ought to have been starved, you say; yes, but they have not been starved, and that fact demonstrates the falsehood of your premises, and renders their refutation unnecessary.

But, not content with thus stultifying your own allegation, you deliver yourself a few pages after, in a happy forgetfulness of what you had just written, in the following terms,—"Here, then, were some remarkable phenomena. A population doubled, the demand for food vastly increased, the foreigner practically excluded, and yet a steady fall in the price of our produce. How is this explained?" (p. 23.) Most inexplicable phenomena, indeed! Scottish farmers of the present generation growing a third less food than their grandfathers, (p. 15;) and yet, with a doubled population, there is an abundance of home-grown food, and a "steady fall in the price of our agricultural produce," (p. 23.) You proceed then manfully to refute yourself, to demolish your own theory, and to rebut and expose what you had written a few pages before; and all this you accomplish with a very creditable success. This proceeding on your part was in the highest degree kind, clever, and considerate. There can be no doubt, as you show, (p. 24,) that it has been in consequence of the progressive improvement in domestic agriculture, that the supply of food has kept pace with the increasing population; and there can be no doubt that this would have continued to be the case, without making us dependent on foreigners for our daily bread, had not Free-trade legislation laid a fatal arrestment on the progress of British agriculture.

You talk wisely on the advantages attending the introduction of bones and guano, and contemptuously of Messrs Watson and Dudgeon, as adhering slavishly to some obsolete system of farming, "stereotyped for them years ago in the books of Professor Low or Mr Stephens." You write this in great ignorance, or in unhappy perversity of temper. Nearly thirty years ago, Mr Watson erected costly machinery for crushing bones, and was at great trouble and expense in testing their value as a manure, and recommending them to his brother farmers; and, in appreciation of his services, they presented him with a valuable piece of plate. (See Journal of Agriculture.) Mr Dudgeon was the very first to report practically to the Highland and Agricultural Society, in 1842, upon the value of guano as applied to the turnip crop, and in the following year had nearly 100 acres of this crop manured with guano, when otherwise the whole breadth of turnips, in the county of Roxburgh, raised with this manure did not reach to this extent. In fact, the very parties whom you affect to sneer at, and their compeers, are the very parties who have raised the character of Scottish farming, and rendered it famous over the world. It is no common trial of the patience to hear them reviled by an inexperienced adventurer, whom the ferment of the times has thrown upon the surface of society.

You disparage the amount expended by Blackwood's farmers on labour, but you forget that they give it as an average expenditure over a series of years, and not for a year or two during the course of expensive improvements; and you expatiate on the tendency of the high farming at Auchness to give employment to an increasing population; and yet you tell us that, at Auchness, "machinery has been applied to every purpose in which labour can be economised about the steading," (p. 11.) The tendency to economise manual labour, and the tendency to increase employment for the agricultural labourers, seem somewhat contradictory and self-destructive features in the Auchness system.