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Their barns and other farm-buildings are usually models for convenience, labor-saving contrivances, and arrangements for the comfort of animals. Their tillage is clean and deep; and in their orchards one always finds the best varieties of fruits.
The bounty upon the exportation of corn, so far us it tends, in the actual state of tillage, to raise the price of that necessary article, produces all the like bad effects; and instead of affording any revenue, frequently occasions a very great expense to government.
Now there is a highway cometh into this road from out of the tilled country and Appleham, a good town, and goeth through it toward the tillage, and the City of the Bridges and the liberties thereof; and all the land is much builded and plentiful; but, if thou wilt, we will not take either highway, but wend over the downland which lieth north-east of Upham, and though it be roadless, yet is it not ill- going, and I know it well and its watering-places, little dales and waters therein all running north-east, wherein be certain little thorps here and there, which shall refresh us mightily.
Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester, Wimborne on both; the waggons will be fired on as they follow the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will go armed into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum.
In either case, if a tenant shall do well with two children, how shall he do with six or eight? A true teetotaller can certainly pay double the rent which may be extracted from a man who drinks. Shall the normal tenant earn wages beyond what he gets from the land under his own tillage?
My own chance was luckier and happier. It came on a day when a party of us had set out in quest of a remote mountain lough. Our way led along the river, and as we drove up to where the valley contracted, and the tillage land decreased in extent and fertility, the type of the people changed. They were Celts and Catholics, evident to the least practised eye.
But the excellence of the method on a proper soil, and conducted by husbandmen, of whom there are few, being readily granted, how, and on what conditions, is this culture obtained? Why, by a very great increase of labor: by an augmentation of the third part, at least, of the hand-labor, to say nothing of the horses and machinery employed in ordinary tillage.
Waltham had the best view to be obtained from any house in Wanley; she looked, as I have said, right over the village street, and on either hand the valley spread before her a charming prospect. Opposite was the wooded slope, freshening now with exquisite shades of new-born leafage; looking north, she saw fruit-gardens, making tender harmonies; southwards spread verdure and tillage.
There were some enterprising and prosperous landowners who used newer and better methods, and even wrote books about "husbandry," as agriculture was called. The Dutch, especially, learned to cultivate their narrow territory carefully, and from them English farmers learned many secrets of tillage.
Famine often visited those parts, and he came to hold the view that men could hardly pray, 'Give us this day our daily bread, with any hope of a favourable answer, or even reasonably expect God's blessing upon their tillage of the soil, while they continued to use a large part of the grain produced in the manufacture of strong drink, and while they continued to set apart large districts for the cultivation of tobacco and opium.
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