Having failed to make a success of his first farm, Young, nothing daunted, undertook the cultivation of Sampford Hall in Essex. This farm consisted of 300 acres of good arable land. But want of practical knowledge, and want of capital, drove him from it, and after a five years' tenancy he paid a farmer £100 to take it off his hands. His successor made a fortune on it. But during these five years Young had made a large number of experiments, the results of which he afterwards published in two large volumes under the title of "A Course of Experimental Agriculture." Still unshaken in his love of the soil, he sought another farm, and the quest furnished materials for his "Six Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties," a very popular work which ran through several editions. It was at this time that on the advice of his Suffolk bailiff he took a farm of one hundred acres at North Mimms in Hertfordshire. This property had a good house, but that seems to have been all. He was deceived by seeing it in a specially good season. This speculation proved worse than the last; but his picturesque pen never failed: "I know what epithet to give this soil. Sterility falls short of the idea—a hungry, vitriolic gravel. I occupied for nine years the jaws of a wolf." The simple fact was that whenever he put pen to paper he was successful; whenever he turned to practical farming he was a ruined man.
He continued to write. His publisher called for more tours. His receipts were considerable, yet we find him recording: "No carthorse ever laboured as I did at this period, spending like an idiot, always in debt, in spite of what I earned with the sweat of my brow, and almost my heart's blood—the year's receipts £1,167." About this time he wrote "Observations on the Present State of the Waste Lands of Great Britain," and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Finding that he could not make enough to live on at farming, he accepted an appointment as Parliamentary Reporter for the "Morning Post" at five guineas a week—a most incongruous job for a farmer since it compelled him to be absent from his home during six days of the week. Yet he retained it for several years—walking seventeen miles down to his farm every Saturday evening and returning to London every Monday morning.
In the year 1784 Young began the publication of the "Annals of Agriculture"—a monthly publication which ran through forty-five volumes. These annals covered the whole field of Agriculture in the form of letters and essays from the most eminent ruralists of the age. But more than a fourth part of the whole series came from the editor's ceaseless pen. Even the King was persuaded to contribute two letters under the nom de plume of "Ralph Robinson," his Windsor shepherd. Young related with much pride that His Majesty said to him one day on the terrace of Windsor: "Mr. Young, I consider myself as more obliged to you than to any other man in my Dominions"; while the Queen observed that they never travelled without a copy of the "Annals" in the Royal carriage. These volumes created quite a stir in European circles, and from all parts of the Continent there flocked scholars to study at the feet of the Abelard of English Agriculture. A year later Young's mother died and Bradfield Hall and farm became his property.
If Tull was the founder of dry-farming, and Coke the father of the experimental farm, Young was unquestionably the author of the agricultural tour. From his fertile pen flowed "The Southern," "The Northern," and "The Eastern Tours," together with "The Tour in Ireland." The first three tours were translated into Russian by the express command of the Empress Catherine, who at the same time sent several young Russians to reside at Bradfield for instruction in British agriculture. It was his own opinion that the most useful feature of the tours was the practical information which they gave on the important subject of the correct courses of crops, on which all preceding writers had been silent. His most famous and most popular work was his "Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788 and 1789."
Yet these remarkable journeys were fore-shadowed twenty years before in a little book he wrote entitled "The Farmer's Letters to the People of England," in which he says: "The nobility and men of large fortune travel, but no farmers; unfortunately, those who have this peculiar and distinguishing advantage, the noble opportunity of benefiting themselves and their country, seldom enquire or even think about agriculture."
Then comes a sketch of a farmer's tour with the routes laid down for the imaginary traveller, being precisely those roads he himself was to follow two decades later.
In the year 1787 he received a pressing invitation from a Polish friend in Paris to join the Count de la Rochefoucauld in a tour of the Pyrenees. "This was touching a string tremulous to vibrate," he writes: "I had long wished for an opportunity to examine France." His travels in France were the sensation of the hour. No one had done quite the same thing before. He was an eye-witness of the moving scenes which ushered in the French Revolution. His name was in everybody's mouth. He received invitations to Courts and salons. All the learned societies enrolled him as a member. His work was translated into a score of languages. Princes, statesmen, scientists, men of letters, simple farmers and plain peasants paid a visit to Bradfield. Among his correspondents we note the names of Washington, Pitt. Burke, Wilberforce, Lafayette, Priestly and Jeremy Bentham. So it happened that when the affluent Coke of Norfolk was holding a Continental sheep-shearing salon at Holkham, his indigent neighbour, fifty miles to the south, was holding a European levee to discuss the fundamental principles of rural economy.
Four years later Young's heart was broken by the death of his favourite daughter, "Bobbin" at the early age of fourteen. He developed religious melancholia, shunned society, left his Journal blank and brooded over sermons. His sight began to fail. He was operated on for cataract. Wilberforce, warned to be careful, went, a week later, to see him in the darkened room. In his sweet and elegant voice the Great Emancipator spoke feelingly of the death of a mutual friend. Young burst into tears and became for ever blind. The remainder of his life was spent in preaching the Gospel to the peasantry and in works of charity. He died in the eightieth year of his age in Sackville Street, London, and was buried at Bradfield, April, 1820.
It is impossible in this brief article to do more than mention the writings of Young. These we must reserve for a subsequent paper. Our library is far from complete, yet we possess sixty-six volumes of his sparkling prose, which, placed one upon another, attain to a height of nine feet—a monument of amazing industry. True, he was not exempt from those petty jealousies which so often mar the character of eminent men. He tried to snatch some credit for the Board of Agriculture from Sir John Sinclair, and he scoffed at the idea that Jethro Tull had invented the corn-drill. He met and conversed with the greatest savants of the age, yet his mind never burst the old wine bottles which he served out in the Suffolk store. And so he arrogantly says that Canada and Nova Scotia are not worth colonising. "If they continue poor, they will be no markets. If rich they will revolt; and that perhaps is the best thing they can do for our interest." ... "The loss of India must come. It ought to come." Yet with all his foolish fancies what a splendid life! For he was the Prophet of the New Agriculture in the Valley of Dry Bones. And England may well write the epitaph of her illustrious son in the words of Ezekiel: "This land that was desolate is become like the Garden of Eden."