CHAPTER VI. The Rise and Depression of Modern Agriculture

THE RISE AND DEPRESSION OF MODERN AGRICULTURE

§ 1. SERVICES RENDERED BY THE GREAT LAND-OWNERS--Although there have been occasions in our industrial history when one is compelled to admit that the deeds of the landed gentry have called for anything but admiration, we yet must not overlook the great services which this class rendered to the agricultural interest in the eighteenth century. I have already mentioned that the development and the success of English agriculture in the half-century or more before the Industrial Revolution was remarkable and extensive; and this success was due to the efforts of the landlords in introducing new agricultural methods. They took an entirely new departure and adopted a new system. It consisted, as I mentioned before, in getting rid of bare fallows and poor pastures by substituting root-crops and artificial grasses. The fourfold or Norfolk rotation of crops was introduced, the landlords themselves taking an interest in and superintending the cultivation of their land and making useful experiments upon it. The number of these experimenting landlords was very considerable, and in course of time the tenant farmers followed them, and thus agricultural knowledge and skill became more and more widely diffused. The reward of the landlords came rapidly. They soon found their production of corn doubled and their general produce trebled. They were able to exact higher rents, for they had taught their {199} tenants how to make the land pay better, and of course claimed a share of the increased profit. About the years 1740–50 the rent of land, according to Jethro Tull, was 7s. an acre; some twenty years or more afterwards Arthur Young found the average rent of land to be 10s. an acre, and thought that in many cases it ought to have been more. It is probable that the landlord would not have done so much for agriculture if he had not expected to make something out of his experiments; but the fact that he was animated by an enlightened self-interest does not make his work any the less valuable. The pioneers of this improved agriculture came from Norfolk, it being uncertain whether Lord Townshend or Mr Coke, the descendant of the great Chief Justice, was the first. But this much is certain: that Lord Lovell, one of the most distinguished and energetic of the new agricultural school, found that his profits under the new system were 36 per cent., as his accounts, still preserved for the year 1731–32, and a copy of which is extant, bear witness. The new agriculture indeed brought with it a revolution as important in its way as the Industrial Revolution. One of the chief features of the change, the enclosures, has been already commented upon. The enclosure of the common fields was beneficial, and to a certain extent justifiable, for the tenants paid rent for them to the lord of the manor. But it was effected at a great loss to the smaller tenant, and when his common of pasture was enclosed as well, he was greatly injured, while the agricultural labourer was permanently disabled. But it was not unnatural that enclosures should rapidly be made when farming, and especially grain-growing, had become so profitable. The reason for the profits of agriculture at this period we can now examine.

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§ 2. The stimulus caused by the Bounties--The Government of the year 1660 had imposed heavy protective duties upon the importation of grain from abroad, in fact prohibiting it except when wheat was at famine prices, as it happened to be in 1662, when it was 62s. 9⁠½d. a quarter, the ordinary price being 41s. But it did not reach this price again for many years afterwards. The Government of 1688, not content with the foregoing protective measure, added a bounty of 5s. per qr. upon the export of corn from England. But the effect of this bounty was not felt for several years, for happily, soon after the passing of the Bounty Act, a series of plentiful harvests occurred, and corn was very cheap. There were consequently loud outcries from the landlords about agricultural distress, which merely meant that the people at large were enjoying cheap food. The aim of the bounty on corn had been to raise prices by encouraging its export, and thus rendered it scarcer and dearer in England. As a matter of fact, it had the opposite effect, for it served as a premium upon which the wheat-grower could speculate, and thus induced him to sow a larger breadth of his land with wheat. The premium upon production caused producers to grow more than the market required, and so prices fell. Thus, happily for the consumer, the Corn Laws and the bounty were harmless during the greater part of the eighteenth century, for farmers competed one against the other sufficiently to keep down prices. But the inevitable Nemesis of protective measures came at the end of the century, when population was growing with unexampled rapidity and required all the corn it could get. Then the prices of corn rose to a famine pitch, while the duty upon its importation prevented it coming into the country in sufficient quantities. The landlords received enormous rents, and {201} the farmers did not mind paying them, for the profits of both were immense. But meanwhile the mass of the people was frequently on the verge of starvation, and at length the country perceived that things could not be allowed to go on any longer in this way. The manufacturing capitalists of the day supported the leaders of the people in their agitation, for they hoped that cheap food might mean low wages. By their aid the landed interest was overcome, and in 1846 the Corn Laws, by the efforts of Cobden and his followers, were finally repealed. Nevertheless the British farmer and his landlords, forgetting, it seems, the days when they got high prices by the starvation of the poor, still frequently clamour for the re-imposition of the incubus of protection.

§ 3. AGRICULTURAL IMPROVEMENTS--The high prices gained by farmers before the repeal of the Corn Laws had, however, one good effect in increasing the development of agricultural skill and of agricultural improvements. The heavy soils of the London clay had at one time been laid out in pasture lands, as being useless for turnip-growing or for root-crops. The corn duties, however, caused these pastures to be broken up for the sake of growing wheat, barley, and clover; the soil was more thoroughly drained, and mangolds were grown as a rotation crop, so that the {202} area of bare fallow was much diminished, while the quantity of food, both for men and cattle, was much increased. In recent years much of this very land has reverted to pasture for dairy-farming. Besides the increase of the area under wheat, special attention was given to artificial manures. The use of bones, at first very roughly broken, became recognized. About 1840–41 dissolved bones and Peruvian guano came into use, particularly in growing turnips, and these were followed very soon by mineral phosphates, and more recently by nitrate of soda and sulphate of ammonia. After the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 the prospects of English agriculture began to look rather gloomy, or at least the farmers thought so. But the tremendous development of trade and population, the stimulus given to all kinds of commerce by the employment of steam, not only for transit but as a motive power for machinery, had their natural influence upon agriculture, and the farmer did well. Improved agricultural machinery came into use, by which farm work was facilitated, and the outlay for labour was lessened. Makers of these machines showed great enterprise and skill, and many altogether new appliances were placed in the farmer’s hands. Steam power has come to be used with advantage in digging, stirring and harrowing the ground, though it has not been such a success in ploughing. Altogether English agriculture made great strides, and was quite prosperous in the years 1870–73, when the general prosperity of the industrial classes was increasing, and people did not mind paying fairly high prices for farm produce. But afterwards a period of depression set in. A succession of bad years, notably the wet and sunless season of 1879 which ruined many a farmer, together with excessive rain and deficient sunshine, most seriously injured the average harvests. {203} Foreign competition in wheat, imported cattle, and butchers’ meat largely increased. The price of wheat fell between 1880 and 1886 from 50s. to 30s. a qr.; between 1884 and 1887 beef fell from 80s. to 55s. per cwt.; and other produce also fell in proportion. Thousands of farmers were then ruined, and agriculture generally suffered a severe and prolonged depression, and much arable land was then laid down again as pasture, indeed some went altogether out of cultivation. Meanwhile the political false prophets were going about with their usual nostrums, and the flags of Protection and even of Bimetallism were both waved before the bewildered eyes of the British farmer, as if they were signals of salvation.

§ 4. THE CAUSE OF THE DEPRESSION. THE RISE IN RENT--Now it is perfectly obvious to an impartial observer of economic facts, that an industry so flourishing as English agriculture was not very many years ago, could not have suffered so severe a collapse unless there had been some great underlying cause, beside the ordinary complaints of bad harvests and foreign competition. Bad harvests are not peculiar to England, and foreign competition, however keen it may be, has first to overstep a very considerable natural margin of protection in the cost of carriage. It costs, for instance, according to that great authority Sir James Caird, 9s. per quarter to transport American wheat from Chicago to London. It is clear that besides these, there must have been other influences of considerable importance, to cause English agriculture to be, in spite of its apparent prosperity, in so insecure a position that it should have sunk to the depressed condition in which it even now remains. We have not to look far for one cause. It is the lack of agricultural capital.

But how, it may naturally be asked, has it come about that the English farmer, after the very favourable period {204} before the depression, should thus suffer from a lack of capital, a lack which renders it almost impossible for him to work his land properly? The answer is simple. His capital has been greatly decreased, surely though not always slowly, by a tremendous increase in his rent. The landlords of the eighteenth century made the English farmer the foremost agriculturist in the world, but their successors of the nineteenth have raised his rent disproportionately. Such, at any rate, is the verdict of eminent agricultural authorities; and the land-owners have been compelled, for their own sake, to reduce the exorbitant rents they received a few years ago. Unfortunately, too, the attention of other classes of the community has been till lately diverted from the condition of our agriculture by the prosperity of our manufactures. But these two branches of industry, the manufacturing and the agricultural, are closely interdependent, and must suffer or prosper together.

It is possible, as I have pointed out elsewhere, that there are certain economic theories which have helped the decline of English agriculture. They are the Ricardian theory of rent, and the dubious “law of diminishing returns.” They have made many people think that this decline was inevitable, and have diverted their attention from the prime, though not the only, cause of the trouble--namely, the increase of rent. But putting these doubtful theories aside, we may employ ourselves more profitably in looking at the facts of the case. I have mentioned before that in Tull’s time, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the average rent of agricultural land was 7s. per acre, and by Young’s time towards the close of the century it had risen to 10s. per acre. Diffused agricultural skill caused an increase of profits, and the hope of sharing in these profits led farmers to give competitive {205} rents, which afterwards the landlords took care to exact in full and frequently to increase. The farmers were enabled to pay higher rents by the low rate of wages paid to their labourers, a rate which the landed gentry, as justices, kept down by their assessments. In 1799 we find land paying nearly 20s. an acre; in 1812 the same land pays over 25s.; in 1830 again it was still at about 25s., but by 1850 it had risen to 38s. 8d., which was about four times Arthur Young’s average. Indeed £2 per acre was not an uncommon rent for good land a few years ago (1885), the average increase of English rent being no less than 26⁠½ per cent. between 1854 and 1879. Now such rent as this was enormous, and could only be paid in very good years. In ordinary years, and still more in bad years, it was paid out of the farmer’s capital. This process of payment was facilitated by the fact that the farmer of this century did not keep his accounts properly, a fruitful source of eventual evil frequently commented upon by agricultural authorities; and also by the other fact, that even when he perceived that he was working his farm at a loss, the immediate loss (of some 10 or 15 per cent.) involved in getting out of his holding was heavy enough in most cases to induce him to submit to a rise in his rent, rather than lose visibly so much of his capital.

The invisible process, however, was equally certain, if not so immediate. The result has been that the average capital per acre now employed in agriculture is only about £4 or £5, instead of at least £10 as it ought to be, and the farmer cannot afford to pay for a sufficient supply of {206} labour, so that the agricultural population is seriously diminishing. Nothing in modern agriculture is so serious as this decline of the rural population, and we must here devote a few words to a consideration of the agricultural labourer and the conditions of his existence.

§ 5. THE LABOURER AND THE LAND. WAGES--It has been previously mentioned that the Industrial Revolution was accompanied by an equally important revolution in agriculture: the main features of the agrarian revolution being the consolidation of small into large farms, the introduction of new methods and machinery, the enclosure of common fields and waste lands, and discontinuance of the old open-field system, and finally the divorce of the labourer from the land. The consolidation of farms reduced the number of farmers, while the enclosures drove the labourers off the land, for it became almost impossible for them to exist on their low wages now that their old rights of keeping small cattle and geese upon the commons, of having a bit of land round their cottages, and other privileges were ruthlessly taken from them. They have retreated in large numbers into the towns and taken up other pursuits, or helped to swell the ranks of English pauperism. Before the Industrial and Agrarian Revolution, Arthur Young in 1769 estimated that out of a total population of 8,500,000 the agricultural class, “farmers (whether freeholders or leaseholders), their servants and labourers,” numbered no less than 2,800,000--i.e. over one-fourth of the total population. The number of those engaged in manufactures of all kinds he puts at 3,000,000. His figures may be taken as substantially correct, though perhaps not as accurate as a modern census. Now let us look at the agricultural population of to-day. The total number of males and females engaged as agricultural {207} wage-earners is only some 689,000--that is, very far below the numbers so engaged a century ago, while the proportion has sunk from one person in four to one in twenty-five concerned in agriculture. At the present time our fields have on the average only one man to cultivate twenty-seven acres of land--and that man is very badly paid for his trouble, be he farmer or labourer.

But not only have the numbers of the agricultural population decreased, but the labourer no longer has any share as a rule in the land. Certainly the agricultural labourer, at any rate in the South of England, was much better off in the middle of the eighteenth century than his descendants were in the middle of the nineteenth. In fact in 1850 or so wages were in many places actually lower than they were in 1750, and in hardly any county were they higher. But meanwhile almost every necessary of life, except bread, has increased in cost, and more especially rent has risen, while on the other hand the labourer has lost many of his old privileges, for formerly his common rights, besides providing him with fuel, enabled him to keep cows or pigs and poultry on the waste, and sheep on the fallows and stubbles, and he could generally grow his own vegetables and garden produce. All these things formed a substantial addition to his nominal wages. In 1750 or so his nominal wages averaged 8s. or 10s. a week; in 1850 they only averaged 10s. or 12s., although in the latter period his nominal wages represented all he got, while in the former they represented only part of his total income. Since 1850, however, even agricultural wages have risen, the present average being 13s. or 14s. a week. The rise, such as it is, is due to some extent to Trade Unions, the leader and {208} promoter of which among agricultural labourers was Joseph Arch. This remarkable man was born in 1826, and in his youth and middle age saw the time when agricultural labour was at its lowest depth. Not only were wages low, being about 10s. or 11s. a week, but the worst evils of the factory system of child labour had been transferred to the life of the fields. The philanthropists seem to have overlooked the disgraceful conditions of the system of working in agricultural gangs, under which a number of children and young persons were collected on hire from their parents by some overseer or contractor, who took them about the district at certain seasons of the year to work on the land of those farmers who wished to employ them. The persons composing the gang were exposed to every inclemency of the weather, without having homes to return to in the evening, people of both sexes being housed while under their contract in barns, without any thought of decency or comfort, while the children often suffered from all the coarse brutalities that suggested themselves to the overseer of their labour. Their pay was of course miserable, though gangs flourished at a time when farmers and landlords were making huge profits. But the degrading practice of cheap gang-labour was defended as being necessary to profitable agriculture; which means that tenants were too cowardly or too obtuse to resist rents which they could not pay except by employing pauperized and degraded labour. Amid times like these Joseph Arch grew up, and it was not till 1872 (at which time it will be remembered that British farmers were doing very well) that he began the agitation which resulted in the formation of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union. His difficulties in organizing the downtrodden labourers were enormous, but he finally succeeded in spite of the resentment of agricultural {209} employers. His efforts have already done much to improve the material condition of the labourers, and wages have decidedly risen from this and other causes. But they certainly cannot be called high.

§ 6. THE PRESENT CONDITION OF BRITISH AGRICULTURE--It remains to notice briefly the causes which are now influencing our agricultural industry, and to point out in what direction we may expect a revival from the present state of depression. Besides the great fact of the increase of rents we notice an increase of foreign competition, which is of comparatively recent date. Our competitors are mainly Russia, America, and last but by no means least, India. At the time of the Crimean War, and for some years subsequently, Russian competition ceased to exist. When it began it, standing alone, was not very serious, for America had not yet entered the field, and was prevented from doing so by the sanguinary struggles of the Civil War. High prices for grain prevailed therefore till some time after America had ceased her internal conflict, and it was only quite recently that much grain was grown for export in India. But since 1870 or so England has been supplied with grain from these three great agricultural lands, and the English farmer, no longer buoyed up at the expense of the rest of the community by protective measures, has found it impossible to grow wheat at a profit at the old rents. Many farmers have been ruined; and at Sir James Caird’s estimate (in 1886) the loss of the agricultural classes of all ranks in spendable income has been nearly £43,000,000 per annum. According to this well-known authority rents should therefore have been reduced by £22,800,000 instead of by much less than half that amount. Even now the aggregate rental is higher than it was before the Russian war. In course of time it is certain that the economic action of {210} supply and demand will bring rents down to something like their commercial value; meanwhile the English landlords, as Mr W. E. Bear remarks, have the choice between allowing their old tenants to be ruined first, and then accepting reduced rents, or granting reductions soon enough to save men in whom they have hitherto had some confidence as tenants. It will be necessary also to make important changes in the laws and customs of land tenure, so that our farmers may have complete security for their capital invested in improvements, and freedom of enterprise (e.g. in cropping and tilling), in order that they may do their best with the land. An extended system of small holdings and allotments, guaranteed by a thorough measure of Tenant Right, together with free trade in land as well as other commodities, would do much to place moderate farms within the reach of industrious and thrifty yeomen and labourers. Greater facilities for transit, including the abolition of the essentially protective system of preferential railway rates, would enable producers to put their produce with ease upon the home market, for English food requirements guarantee an enormous and steady demand at home for every scrap of food-stuff that the land is capable of producing. The farmer is slow to adapt himself to changed conditions, but a profitable future is open to him even if he gives up wheat-growing and betakes himself more to dairy-farming and market-gardening. But it may not be necessary for him to give up wheat, for it seems probable that the wheat area of the world, except in India, will not increase; since foreign farmers are beginning to find out that they cannot put wheat on the English market at the present low prices. People will see that it is desirable, and that ultimately it will be profitable, to recall capital and labour back to the land which it is evident that it has left; {211} and that it is the height of economic folly to rely, as some do, upon the extension of our manufacturing industries to counteract agricultural depression. Prosperous agriculture means for us prosperous manufactures, and from an economic point of view the interests of the plough and the loom are identical. Neither can be served by protective tinkering. Reforms of a totally different character are needed, foremost among which is a widespread reduction of rent, and a general rearrangement of the relations between landlord and tenant. It is on the face of it ridiculous to assert that, with an unequalled demand in the home market for all he can produce, the English farmer cannot find some means of making the land pay and pay well. But before he can do this he must spend more capital upon it than he has lately been able to do.

Showing Population and Manufactures

Manufacturing districts are shown by slanting lines; large manufacturing towns by black circles; and the most populous counties are coloured darker than the others. It will be noticed that population since 1750 has shifted very much to the North and North West of England, whilst manufactures are far more concentrated than formerly.]