The Culture of Flax.

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But Professor Low does not deny the productiveness of flax, or the richness of linseed; he only says that it is not as well suited to maintain or increase productiveness as some others. Which others? Certainly none of the usual grain, root, or green crops; for by adding flax to these, Mr. Warnes it appears has increased the productiveness of his farm, in the article of wheat. Such a result, by the bye, might have been prophesied à priori by one of those agricultural chemists whom Professor Low despises. For flax, like other oil-bearing plants, has an extraordinary power of absorbing nitrogen from the air, as well as from the soil, for the production of its linseed, while it takes up from the soil hardly any of these salts so necessary for the wheat plant. Thus, Mr. Warnes' wheat crops will have been enriched, from year to year, by all the nitrogen which the flax has absorbed from the atmosphere, as well as by the increased amount of salts which have been liberated from the soil by the deeper tilth required for the flax

roots.

"But," says Professor Low," it must be pretty evident, that if a profit of £20 or £25 an acre could be made by raising flax in England," (which, as we have seen, nobody asserts), the Baltic farmers, who can raise it as well as we can, would not long leave us in possession of so profitable a monopoly. The Dutch will undertake to supply us with any quantity we choose to consume." We answer-really under correction, for Professor Low may have better information on the point than ourselves -that, in the first place, it is a great question whether Baltic farmers can grow flax as well as we can. For it cannot be grown like wheat, by barbaric and careless tillage, made profitable by the innate powers of a virgin soil. It requires deep tilth, care, experience, and, above all, a large supply of nitrogenous manure, which the Baltic farmers do not possess, and cannot acquire without an enormous increase of their live stock at a proportionately enormous expense: while we have close at hand, in our sewage manure, an inexhaustible supply of the materials of flax and linseed, as well as of wheat. As for the Dutch, we question whether they can "supply us with any quantity we want." Neither they nor the Baltic farmers have, at least, yet contrived to supplant the Irish flax-grower in the linen mills of Belfast; why should they in Manchester or Glasgow? Their country is already so highly cultivated as to allow of no considerable increase of produce; the flax they now grow now goes somewhere; if they withdraw it from its present market to throw into ours, it will only leave an opening for our cotton, perhaps for our flax-unless, indeed, their former customers shall resolve to go naked for the sake of Professor Low's refutation; and thus the matter becomes " very nearly as broad as it is

VOL. XIV. NO. XXVII.

H

long." Perhaps the true reason of Professor Low's contempt for flax culture is the very one which may possibly recommend it to some of our readers-that free-traders and political economists are approving of it; that Mr. Cobden has recommended a careful examination of the whole question as pregnant with important and beneficial consequences to home-manufacturers; that that gentleman's brother, as well as the Messrs. Marshall of Leeds, and other large capitalists, are briskly promoting both the growth and manufacture of flax, and, finally, (though this fact, we should have thought, would have been worth the notice even of a Protectionist,) that the extreme deficiency in last year's American cotton crop, and the expected entire failure of that of this year, afford an opening for the home flax trade, unparalleled for the last thirty years.

We should gladly, did space allow, comment at length on the advantages which the labourer as well as the farmer, derives from flax, as asserted by Mr. Warnes, and corroborated by the Morning Chronicle. In Trimmingham, during the last ten years, poor-rates have become almost nominal; want of employment for all sexes and ages almost unknown; the morals of the poor, and the condition of their dwellings and habits of life have improved together, under the influence of a species of detailed and skilled labour, which Professor Low and his school of agriculturists have been in the habit of slighting, as "unsuited to the economy of labour proper on a well-ordered farm."

The same observations were applied also to the culture of silk. There is not the slightest doubt, from the experiments of the late Mrs. Whitby of Lymington, and of her disciples, that silk, commanding a higher price in the market than any foreign samples whatever, can be profitably grown, at least along the southern coasts of England, by employing, instead of the old white mulberry, the hardier and more prolific "morus multicaulis" of Asia, which is now, we believe, superseding the white mulberry on the continent. Even among the poor gravelly soils, and the severe spring frosts of the north of Hampshire, the experiment has succeeded. If not as profitable an investment to the tenant farmers as to some others, silk culture might at least form a large addition to the income of the peasant; and there is no reason whatever why the glens of Devon and Dorset, now so often mere uncultivated nests of pauperism and savagery, should not be hereafter clothed with gardens of mulberry, affording both wealth and civilizing, because skilled, employment to the now wretched labourers.

Once more, it is by no means yet proved, that maize and lentils may not be cultivated safely and profitably in England. Mr. Keene's pamphlet, whose title stands among others at the head of

The Actual Effects of the Crisis.

115 this Article, announces a new sort of maize, which he asserts will ripen on the Pyrennees, in a climate at least as severe as that of England. Large quantities of it were actually ripened safely last year, and the only specimens of it which we have seen this year, show every sign of ultimate success. We earnestly hope that such may be the case, and that these inestimable grains may hereafter contribute a large proportion of the food of our peasantry in the south of England and in Ireland. One question, en passant, as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory of Protection, and we will dismiss the subject. If the southern counties of England should really take up the culture of maize, must not the less favoured northern counties be protected against them? Will Professor Low and his party, in that case, agitate for a cordon de douane along the line of the Great Western, and impose heavy duties on every sack of maize which shall dare to intrude its destructive cheapness to the north of the Thames? If one country is to be protected against another by tariffs, one parish against another by laws of settlement, why not one county against another by octrois against maize, or any other production which shall introduce the ruinous elements of cheapness and abundance?

We have in the preceding pages attempted, more concisely than we should have wished, to point out some of the capabilities of British agriculture, and we look to North Britain, which has been always foremost in science and daring, still to lead the van towards these and far greater improvements. We are well aware that it may seem insulting to call upon men to exert themselves especially, in a moment like this, when they are especially crippled, but the pain of a remedy does not prove its inefficacy, nor is present distress the slightest argument against future prosperity. It is at the expulsion of a corrupt system, as during the cure of a disease, that the disorganization which it has produced is most palpable. It is when deprived of stimulants that the drunkard discovers his weakness, and has to endure many a miserable day before he can replace his artificial and temporary vigour by real and solid health. Even so will it fare with agriculture. Farmers will fail in abundance. Landlords will be ruined. But which of them? The men of capital, science, energy? No-The idler, the dolt; the man who is farming 100 acres of land on little more than a hundred pounds of capital; the landlord who has mortgaged his estate, squandered his rents on harlots; they will fail and vanish, and labourer, land, and country will be well rid of them. But the men who are really fit to farm land-men such as are as common in North Britain as they are rare in the South, will rise after the storm-the wiser, doubtless, by many a wholesome

lesson, ready to adapt themselves to the circumstances of the future as manfully as they have to those of the past. The very fact of their having larger capitals than usual embarked in the land, while it may make them feel the first burst of the storm more severely than those who have less to lose, will at the same time give them greater power of recovering themselves. If they are really wronged, if any existing enactments can be shewn to tax or hamper their occupation, they have a right to demand, and they will as surely obtain, the repeal of them, provided only that they do not by angry declamation, illogical arguments, provoking threats, and equally provoking appeals on behalf of labourers who do not require their sympathy, disgust and exasperate the mass of the British nation.

But if, in spite of the rebukes and exhortations of the vast majority of educated Britons, in spite of the increasing needs of the uneducated masses, the majority of the agriculturists shall still remain in their present mind;-if they shall still glory in rejecting the proved laws of political economy, and ridiculing the discoveries of science;-if they shall still refuse to help themselves, or to listen to any one who offers to help them ;-if they shall still set up the interest of their class against that of the mass of the nation;-if they shall still glory in confessing their own impotence, and give us useless lamentations, instead of productive labours-if they shall still pretend, by insincere and idle agitation and still more insincere and idle threats, to compass a protectionist re-action which they know to be impossible;—if they shall still refuse to meet like men, each by new endeavours on his own land, the exigencies of a new time, and prefer to remain-we quote in saddest earnest "children sitting in the market-place," refusing like that perverse generation in old Judea, to sympathize either with the deeds and sorrows, or with the hopes and comforts of their fellow-men ;-then they must not be surprised if the British nation shall take them at their word, and addressing them in a novel and more peremptory tone,

say

"Well, Gentlemen, we have heard your complaints of inability to farm the land. We grant the truth of your statements, and when granted, what do they prove? Not that the land cannot be farmed henceforth, but merely that you cannot farm it. You assert that henceforth the tenant farmer cannot exist. Why should he? Is there any absolute and necessary law, human or divine, which makes it impossible to cultivate the land by any other agency than the single one of landlord, farmer and dayabourer? Doubtless you believe in the existence of such a aw; for it is the habit of poor short-sighted humanity in every age to assume that the thing which is, always has been, and shall

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be for ever; and to erect the temporary accidents of its own narrow experience into divine and eternal necessities, without which the very sun would be blotted from the sky.-And behold a century passes, and the eleventh commandment of two generations back has given place to a fresh superstition, and is regarded as the solecism of barbarians. Are you aware, for instance, that it is only within the last century that any large proportion of the British soil has been cultivated by tenant farmers on the present system? Are you aware that only an exceedingly small proportion of the earth's surface has in any age or country been cultivated on that system? Learn that yeoman proprietors, metayers, cottier tenantries, and numberless other forms of agricultural class-economy have existed, and do exist still, and that fresh methods of productive distribution, fresh classes of agriculturists, may arise hereafter, and most probably will; the experience, invention, and economic knowledge of mankind being by no means yet exhausted, but rather in its infancy. No doubt the British system, which combines landlord, farmer, and labourer, is the best yet practised in an old and thickly peopled country; but it is not perfect. It has not tended to make the landlords as useful as possible, for it has encouraged them in idleness, neglect, and absenteeism. It has not tended to the maximum welfare of the labourer, for it has nowhere retarded, and in the Eastern and Southern Counties of England it has accelerated, his downward progress into slavery and brutality; it has made him, fearful paradox! a nomad and a glebæ adscriptus, a prisoner and a homeless man. It has put him, his house, his family, into the absolute power of your class, the class who are to this day doggedly resisting every attempt to educate, to civilize, or even give him the means of cleanliness and common decency. The only argument for the present system has been, that it hitherto was the best means of applying to the land the capital, energy, and skill of the middle classes without destroying the rights of property: and that last argument you have now cut from under your own feet. It is you, and not the free-trader, who assert that the middle class can no longer profitably apply either themselves or their money to the soil. It is you, and not the free-trader, who assert that the tenant-farmer system is in itself so intrinsically rotten and fallacious that even in a densely peopled country like England, it cannot yield the fair profits of trade without the hot-house protection of monopoly prices and insufficient supply of the necessaries of life to the whole working class. We do not assert this. It is you, we repeat-you farmers yourselves, who are now trumpeting forth over all the kingdom the cessation of the last remaining argument for your existence as a class. But do not fancy that the soil of Great Britain will lie fal