THE CHARM OF FARMING.

THE most remarkable fact about farming in the present day, is that there are still applicants for farms. There are desperate struggles over rent, and concessions are demanded which drive agents wild; but except in a few districts where the land is exceptionally bad, or the tithe is exceptionally heavy, farms do not become actually derelict. Somebody, if it be only the owner, keeps them in cultivation. Yet to judge by all that is said, there is no occupation in this

island so unattractive as that of the " farmer," by which indefinite word we mean in this article, the man who cultivates hired land with capital through hired labour. There have always been certain things against him to make his business distasteful to outsiders. He has always appeared to be in a special degree at the mercy of fate. No doubt in every business success depends to a certain degree upon ac- cident, good luck, or that combination of causes which no man can regulate, but the farmer lives and thrives, or is ruined, at the mercy of what must often seem to him capricious causes. He may work the whole year, and spend during the whole year, and then be deprived of his profit by a change in the weather for which he at least is entirely irre- sponsible. Any professional man or trader may be deprived of his business by accident,—ill-health, for instance, or a change, to him unintelligible, in the favour of the public or of his individual connection, or by the bankruptcy of persons over whom he had no control ; but the farmer who loses his hay-crop by rain, or his corn-crop by frost or blight, must feel as if Providence were almost spiteful, or, at the best, as the Scotchman said of the hail, " a little inconsiderate." It can never be quite pleasant, either, to pay away to a landlord, who has perhaps done nothing except exist, a third of the whole produce of the year. Rent is a return for lent capital, and is a perfectly fair demand ; but there is hardly a farmer in the world, any more than there is an editor, who does not feel that he gave the capital its yielding power, and that the share of the yield taken away from him is a little too large. He gets his profit, too, in driblets, after infinite care and pains, and he pays his rent away in a lump, and that is always exasperating. Then he has always the vexation that his business cannot seriously increase. The little shopkeeper may develop into the millionaire, the briefless barrister may become Attorney-General, but the farmer has never, in our days at least, any of the happy chances of life to inflame his imagination or soothe his temper. If he does fairly well— that is, makes on an average 7 per cent.—he is a very lucky man ; but fortune is no more for him than for any one of his labourers. He has to be content with an average, and that a very low one, and is nearly deprived of the infinite charm of indefinite hope. These causes for despondency are permanent, and existed even when farming was supposed to pay ; but now that prices have fallen till farming means to six farmers in ten direct though slow loss of money, the reasons for discontent have become unanswerable. To labour on for a lifetime, and at the end be a pauper, is of all the

careers that can be run the most disheartening, and that is the eareer which to-day seems to outsiders the only one open to the agriculturist. He may work as hard as he likes, he may carry economy to the point of penuriousness, he may watch markets with the vigilant acumen of a stocktroker, and still he will find his capital yearly slipping away. It does not slip fast, but still it slips, until, if the farmer is not more reasonable than any other manufacturer, he begins to regard himself as a wronged being, till rent seems a perfect oppression, and till he indulges privately in thoughts about tithes and rates which, if they only knew them accurately, would give both clergymen and Chancellors of the Exchequer just cause for alarm.

And yet there are always applications for farms. The business has attractions which to a large section of the com- munity are indestructible, even by continuous losses. Farm- ing is, to begin with, wholesome business, and business which must benefit mankind. The farmer, as a rule, is not a philanthropist, bat we all have strong feelings about our trades and their utility, and the farmer's notion of himself is that among men he is the most necessary, that to "stub Thornaby waaste," is a virtuous as well as a useful act. It is not the Asiatic farmer alone who has a slow, slightly sardonic, pride in his work, or whose ideas are accurately expressed in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's fine song :-

" 'He sent the Mahratta spear

As He sendeth the rain, And the Mlech,* in the fated year, Broke the spear in twain, And was broken in turn. Who knows How our Lords make strife ?

It is good that the young wheat grows,

For the bread is Life.'

And the Ploughman settled the share More deep in the sun-dried clod:— 'Mogul, Mahratta, and Mlech* from the North, And White Queen over the Seas—

God raiseth them up and driveth them forth As the dust of the ploughshare flies in the breeze; But the wheat and the cattle are all my care, And the rest is the will of God.'" There is a great pleasure in creating, and the farmer feels in his heart that he has at all events helped greatly to create his crop, and when it is a fine one, is personally as proud as the

artist or musician. He did not make either the corn or the hay, but it would not have been there without him; and he rejoices in the success which, as he at all events thinks—often rightly—has been due to his promptitude, or power of organisation, or foresight. "I knew this would be a year

and this the place for clover." Then the farmer's business is nearly the only one by which a man may live without confine- ment to the house, or a strict adherence to the time of work, or dependence upon colleagues; and citizens forget the number of men who hold confinement to be imprisonment, who simply cannot work in a chair from 10 to 5, or who crave in their work for a kind of solitary independence. Life is worth nothing to them without air and exercise, and the right of enjoying both without thinking of rules, or asking anybody's leave. With the older farmers, this independence of every one but the landlord is a passion, and it stirs the heart, also, of most of the new men who, in decreasing numbers, seek a place in the trade. The farmer, too, if his farm ex- ceeds three hundred acres, has many of the advantages of a " gentleman." He cannot spend liberally, but be has a good house, the use of horses, men and maidens at command, a garden limited only by his means and tastes, and time and opportunity to benefit by the use of them all. He is the head of an establishment, not the mere occupant of a house and office. His position, while he can pay his wages regularly on Saturdays, is an authoritative one, and enables him to feel that he is somebody in the parish, a feeling which the citizen, unless he is also a poli- tician, much more rarely enjoys. He has time, too, for per- sonal tastes, the whole evening every day, as well as many bits of off-time, and often enjoys his opportunity to the full.

The number of farmers who have " tastes," be it only for gardening or ornithology is very great, and there is no one to snub or check them with hints of time unprofitably wasted. There are many sciences to which farmers contribute, some of them with unusual knowledge, and to all, the power of doing as they like with leisure has a permanent charm.

Such a pursuit so circumstanced, will always and does always attract men who love the ont-of-door life, who cannot exist amid the surroundings of the streets, and who, if that is to be the worst of it, prefer to be slowly ruined amid rural sur- roundings. They like to live in the air, among equals, doing work which at worst must be unobjectionable, and at best is highly beneficial to the country. "It is great fun," as the

keen Americans say, with their queer power of packing a situation into a phrase, "to live on a farm, unless you have to." The farmers know that if they manage decently, it will take a lifetime to ruin them, and they never surrender the hope of better times. It seems to them so un- reasonable that food-growing should be a ruinous occupa- tion, that they do not at heart believe it, except as a momentary break in the history of agriculture, and they are taught, as no other men are taught, patience by their

trade. You must, whether you like it or not, wait for the seasons, and the farmer always waiting for them, learns to

• One without caste.

wait for the markets too. He grumbles, of course, as a waiting Englishman must, and that slipping away of money makes him anxious and indisposed that his children should follow his trade ; but we never met the farmer yet who did not at heart believe that better times may come round. The truth is, he likes his business as few other of man- kind do, and took to it not only because he knew no other, but in obedience to instincts which were part of his whole nature. We do not believe those instincts will die out, and at all events they are the strongest forces which at present keep England in cultivation. It is a pity that land- lords cannot foster them by even larger reductions of rent; but they spring of themselves even in the most hopeless dis- tricts where, as the farmers know well, only one kind of farming will succeed at all, and that the one which for the present makes it a costly speculation even to sow seed. It must seem to men bred in commercial ways a curious fact that the cultivation of the world has always gone on irre- spective of prices, and that there are large districts even now covered annually with rich crops, though no kind of food can be sold there for a money price at all.