15 MARCH 1856, Page 13

THE SCARECROW.

FROM the description given by the Farmer's Friends in the House of Lords, he may be painted as a gloomy mysterious person, who suspects an enemy in every stranger that approaches, is bent upon performing his work in secret, and desires only to keep all eyes off his land. He has trembled to see a bird pass over his fields, though it has now been discovered that some birds feed on worms. He has rewarded men to seek out the burrowing mole and carry it away ; and has a little later been compelled, by un- deniable instruction, to pay men for bringing the mole back unto the land, since it is found that the industrious animal is the great- est devourer of the wireworm. He has trembled to see the stranger pass over his land to any distance from the homestead, lest the passenger's eyes should note the change in the appearance of the crop from luxuriant green to sickly yellow, because the symptom proved the short supply of manure to the land —to the outlying fields ; and if it came to the landlord's knowledge, would suggest the inquiry whether the farmer could not . more profitably farm less land. He preferred to be a beggarly cultivator over a larger spread of land, rather than to concentrate his little means upon the land he could use with a full and certain profit. In short, the fanner, complaining of "agricultural distress," turned pale to see any one come who could explain to him the causes of his distress. "Leave me alone ! " he cried. "Leave him alone ! " echoed the friends. The cause of his distress was the very thing he dreaded to have found out; like the patient who, conscious of illness dreads to learn the character of his disease. There has been a illness, of sta- tistics: the farmer trembles at numbers ; he sees them in rating- papers, he hears them denounced in the Bible ; his head is not good-at figures, they are the invention of schoolmasters that flog- ged, of tax-collectors that pursue him, of-political economists that repeal the Corn-laws, and of other diabolical disturbers. But a movement whose beginning and end and whole purpose are figures —that is to him horrible and unintelligible. It will violate his secrecy ; it will puzzle his brains to fill up the returns ; it will, says Lord Dungannon, destroy the independence of the British farmer, for it is "arbitrary and inquisitorial." Of all things that the British farmer dreads, light is the most horrible. Tho sunshine itself is dangerous for it discloses. His friends have taken dangerous, part ; have done their best to keep out the statists as they have done the moles and the birds. They endeavour to do it by frightening away the intruders ; and to that end they. are even now making a great scarecrow. It is the figure of " the true British Farmer," as he will appear at market after

the passing of the Government independence destroyed, his prosperity gone, his brain alienated, his countenance haggard and dejected. The British farmer as mad Tom is the figure set up to frighten away statists. But even birds eventually see through the character of a scarecrow, of which they learn to make a perch ; and Viscount Dungannon is mistaken if he thinks that the collect- ors of statistics are to be frightened away with a tragic doll.

• The chief dread of the farmer appears to be, that his arrange- ments for cropping his land will be exposed to others—to the earn-dealer of the nearest town, or to the landlord, or perhaps to the eater of bread at a distance. Now the curious fact is, that the farmer is trying to conceal what is unceneealable. The land- lord can know in a morning's ride exactly what the farmer is at ; the agent has twenty means of finding out, and perhaps knows something more than the farmer himself—knows, for example, that the style of farming is below the level of modern science, or how far the farmer is departing from the most profitable course of cropping with reference to the probabilities of the market ; facts which the man himself, "independent" of all information, knows nothing about. The individual ease it is quite impossible to con- ceal in any part of the country ; the thing concealed is, the dis- tribution of cropping and the state of the lands of all farmers. This information respecting all is concealed from each by the want of machinery for bringing it together, grouping it, and presenting to the view. The mystery which the farmer would therefore at- tempt to maintain fails to conceal his own individual case, but conceals from him the case of everybody else.

By degrees the farmer's friends have been weaned from this false reliance upon ignorance. The only question that di- vides the House of Lords is the mode of collecting the statistics. Government proposes to hand the duty of collection to the Poor- law officers, who have indeed conducted the preliminary inquiries with much ability. Lord Derby justly considers, that the Poor- law officers are not likely to render the duty popular or satisfac- tory, and he would substitute the magistrates at Quarter or Petty Sessions. This would be a very loose machinery, and open to all the objections on the score of inquisitorial scrutiny.. The Poor- law officers, mixed as they are with local politics, with the duties of collecting and assessing rates, and other not agreeable func- tions, might also be open to suspicion. There is another machin- my possessed by the Executive which extends all over ths country, which comprises officers familiarized with the collection of figures, and which possesses chiefs versed in the grouping of statistics— ire mean the Registrar-General's department. Officially this is disconnected from any process of tax-levying or political movement, and we doubt whether it would not be the very best for the purpose now in hand. By whatsoever machinery collected, however, the sta- tistics; if they are complete—and they are likely to be so under a faildly compulsory measure—will for the first time let us who live upon the produce of the land know, contemporaneously, how the land is laid out, and how the produce is got in ; so that in the face of growing abundance we shall not continue to burden the market with accumulated stores, and in the prospect of certain scarcity we shall not hurry the sales of scanty stocks after the harvest, squandering our own stores and cheating the farmer of his fair price, to eke out our means at last with hastily imported foreign produce.