We also find that 130 cattle, and about 190 sheep, are annually fattened upon the farm. The large extent of the green crop, and the quantity of cattle fed, are the salient and prominent features of the system. This you admit, I am therefore taking you in the spirit more than in the letter. Is a system, embracing such a disproportion between its root and grain crops, adapted for extension? Try its effects upon a small scale—extend it over a district of the average extent of Scotch counties, and inquire what would be the result. You will find that there would be a produce of about 301,417 tons of potatoes, 114,845 fat cattle, and 167,788 sheep—a produce more than equivalent to supply every town in Scotland with potatoes and butcher meat. Or, to indulge your parochial partialities, let us inquire what would be the results if one farm in every parish in the kingdom were farmed according to the Auchness fashion. In England, Wales, and Scotland, there are 11,583 parishes. We would have of "edible roots" i. e. potatoes, 4,633,200 tons, after allowing an equal quantity to be destroyed by the rot, as apparently happened at Auchness last year. Of wheat, 2,782,816 qrs. Of fat cattle, 1,505,790. Of fat sheep, 2,409,264—and a snug little money profit from hoggets and cows, young horses and ewes, of some ten millions. A small model farm in each parish of the island can supply its present population with beef and potatoes, and leave of the latter a liberal supply to the Rector's "generous pigs." Double our population, and add another model farm to each parish, and the wants of "the million" are forthwith supplied. Avaunt Malthus! all hail, Caird! "A plethora of beef, a plethora of vegetables," you facetiously exclaim. You have not considered that there may be a plethora of food, with concomitant destitution, nay starvation, amongst the poor and unemployed. Read the Irish correspondence of the Morning Chronicle, and the Clare Journal for February, and you will find that the two things actually co-exist at this moment in some parts of Ireland. But the next inquiry is, Would there be a plethora of profit as well as of food? Would the balance-sheet do, and would "change the figure" not be the instant cry? Suppose the potato epidemic to pass away, or allow even the present supplies of that root and of butcher-meat from other sources to be continued, would potatoes bring 30s. per ton, and beef 4d. per lb? It is not in the least degree probable. Is it not certain, too, that there would be such a demand for foreign manures as would raise their price beyond the possibility of profitably using them?
But perhaps this is copying the model too servilely. Well, modify it to such an extent as to preserve in operation the leading principles of the system—which is based upon cattle-feeding and potato culture to an extent wholly out of proportion with the other products of the farm—and the system will still prove self-destructive, inasmuch as its tendency must be to increase the cost of production, and to lower the value of the produce raised. With regard to the cost of production, Table ii. in your "addition" (4th ed. p. 40,) enables us readily to test the question. It appears that Mr M'Culloch's "expenditure per acre for labour, artificial manures, purchased food, and expenses of management," exceeded the average expenditure of Messrs Watson, Dudgeon, and Christopher by £3, 11s. 7¾d. Now you tell us from Porter that, of garden and tillage lands in Great Britain, there are 13,637,320 acres. To bring up these—which, however, include Auchness—to the mark of the Auchness system at a farther expenditure of £3, 11s. 7¾d. per acre, an additional capital of £48,852,857, would be required by British farmers. And this is "High Farming farther illustrated!" and you correct Peter Plough by adding eleven millions to his estimate of the new capital required! I am here stealing a leaf from the book of Peter Plough; but, if you will not allow us to look at your case in this light, it is not worth a moment's notice. If the system cannot be reduced to practice, why tantalise the farmer by bringing the cup to his lips, but denying him the power of slaking his thirst?
You seem to think that you have communicated new and invaluable information to the practical farmer, and you "challenge Mr Stephens, within the whole compass of his two thousand pages of letterpress, to exhibit an instance equally instructive," (p. 27.) What is it that is so new? Is it the value of manure and its extensive application that constitutes the novelty, now for the first time made known? The ancient Romans anxiously collected their manure from as many sources as the moderns do. They liberally employed liquid manure and pigeons' droppings, (your guano,) then esteemed of inestimable value. Or, is it the stall-feeding system that you publish as something so new and instructive? Why, the Metayers of Lombardy have long fed their cattle in a somewhat similar fashion, but with more extraordinary care. They feed them in stalls—they bleed them—they brush them twice a-day, whether with "a dandy brush" or not is not recorded, and they rub them over with oil. The oleaginous application is something more exquisite than the Auchness system administers. There is, in truth, nothing new in what you have written, as every educated agriculturist knows; and you might have found your "instructive instances" almost in any history of agriculture in any one of our Cyclopedias. When I consider this, I have been forcibly reminded of the valorous exploits of the immortal hero of one of Sir Walter Scott's best poems, which the bard thus commemorates,—
"Donald Caird finds orra things,
Whare Alan Grigor fand the tings."
You apparently now stand alone and unsupported in your advocacy of high farming, foolishly so called, as the substitute for Protection, and as a source of profitable investment under the depressed prices of agricultural produce. "The leading organ of the Protectionists," is so heterodox in your estimation, that one cannot expect you to imbibe wisdom from such a source. But perhaps you may listen more benevolently to the other powerful and accredited organ of political opinion in North Britain on the question of high farming, and the possibility of its adoption as a present remedy for the clamant evils under which the agricultural community now labours. You will do well, before you write again, to ponder over and inwardly to digest the following pregnant sentences, which embody an admirable synopsis of the truth. The italics are mine.
"It is true, that high farming can maintain a large labouring population; but high farming requires, not only that high scientific knowledge which is of slow growth, but also a large expenditure of capital. It is the possession of great skill, habitual energy, and vast capital, which alone renders possible such a system of farming, horticultural rather than agricultural, as has grown up in Belgium in the midst of abundant markets, wealthy towns, and flourishing manufactures,—a system the origin and growth of which has been favoured by every circumstance that can promote industry and protect its fruits."—Edinburgh Review, January 1850, (p. 18.) Mr Mechi speaks problematically of the profit of high farming; that amiable experimenter, Mr Huxtable, ingenuously confesses his losses, and allows that last year he was minus £32 of his rent; Mr M'Culloch even seems half disposed to leave you in the lurch. He is reported, in the Scotsman of the 13th February last, to have said at a public meeting in Newton-Stewart, on the 1st February,—"That, before the improved system could be properly carried out, the landlords must give encouragement particularly in draining and buildings." Millions of money, which the proprietors have not, must be expended; and millions of additional capital must be at the command of the farmers, which they have not, before the system can be carried out. Enthusiast although he be, Mr M'Culloch begins to see the impracticable nature of the scheme. Moreover, before the improvements could be effected, supposing the requisite capital to be had, and before any profit could accrue from them, years would elapse. For the improvements and profits of agriculture, unlike those in manufactures, cannot be realised in a few months. The farmers, with a continuation of the present prices, will in the mean time be ruined, unless rents are diminished one-third, and, on the poorer soils, extinguished altogether—in which event, again, two-thirds of the proprietors of the kingdom would be ruined. These are the immediate accompaniments attending your cheap food for the people, your plethora of potatoes, and your plethora of beef. The ultimate issue will speedily reach the people whom you delude, and the Manchester Free-traders whose sweet voices you court.
But you have further shown us, that there is a necessity for the compulsitor of an act of Parliament to nullify existing leases, and to establish the conditions of the liberal covenant, and that a change of the figure in the rent is imperiously called for. In other words, you prescribe not for the existing condition of agriculture, but for an imaginary case of your own construction. Your views are based on hopes and contingencies vague and visionary. Your theory, as further illustrated, avowedly contemplates a possible case, which not only does not exist, but which is a moral impossibility. That such views should have attracted any notice, and raised any serious discussion, the critical emergency of the times, as already stated, sufficiently explains. Drowning men catch at straws; and, during the prevalence of an inscrutable pestilence, the afflicted and excited sufferer, loth to relinquish the hope of life, flees to any doctor, however quackish and empirical. The practical agriculturists of the kingdom have made up their mind upon the practicability and general utility of your schemes; and, while frankly allowing that much remains to be done for the further advancement of agriculture, and that high farming, in any profitable or practicable sense, is indispensable, they unanimously repudiate the utopianism of your theory as a cure for the dire evils into which, by no fault of their own, they have been plunged. The Perthshire farmer, the only brother tenant of whom you have spoken in the language of civility, and who, in his judicious pamphlet, had shown that Mr M'Culloch, in 1848, must have lost by his farm, repels your advances, and scorns your supercilious compliments. He writes, that "he would far rather have received Mr Caird's buffet than his embrace." (Stirling Journal, 15th February.)
You are now "left alone in your glory;" but that glory is neither small nor contemptible. By that portion of the press who are fired with a hatred of landlordism, and who have taken a vow to sacrifice the agricultural classes to the cupidity of the master manufacturers, you are praised and flattered as the only man of mark and likelihood in North Britain. Although Adam Smith, and more recently M. de Tocqueville, have given it as their opinion that the agricultural classes are more intelligent and intellectual than the manufacturing, yet there is a section of "the fourth estate" in the realm, who cannot speak of farmers without employing insulting epithets derogatory to their intelligence and education. With this fraternity you are an especial favourite; and not without cause. They are wise in their generation, and they see well enough that your speculations, as those of a farmer, serve their purpose better than any of their own could possibly do. They perceive that your Georgical essays are raising delusions in the minds of the ignorant, and bolstering up the vain hopes of Free-trade proprietors, and pandering to the agrarian passions of the unprincipled, and are thus admirably calculated to divert attention from the clamant sufferings of the agricultural community, and to stifle any attempt to devise a real remedy for them. I am sure that, in your heart, you mean none of these things; but it is surprising that the fulsome praises of such parties, and their enlistment of you into their ranks, have not raised a suspicion in your mind regarding the tendency of your writings, and the somewhat dubious and equivocal position which you now occupy.
That powerful print, the Times, disparages the intelligence of farmers, and writes with levity on the subject of their present sufferings. If landlords and tenants cannot prosper under present prices, it tells them cavalierly to sell off, and to emigrate. Surveying them and their fields, it kindly intimates—
"Hæc mea sunt; veteres migrate coloni."