Country Life
FROM HAMILTON TO WILTSHIRE.
A long letter has reached me from a young emigrant to New Zealand, which by a very pat coincidence fits exactly with a simultaneous expression of English experience. The emigrant, aftei recording the heavy losses sustained by farmers owing to the fall in values, concludes with this moral, in regard to a particular farm : " he would have been all right if he had stuck to dairying." Now dairy farming in New Zealand is of an intensive nature, scarcely credible in the ears of English farmers. This young emigrant is already milking fifty heifers in his first few weeks on the farm, and expects to milk 120 before long. The farm, which is to support all these milch cows and a few bulls and other stock, including hens and bees, consists of 180 acres of grass—that and no more—and most of the fodder is to come off it as well ! Such heavy stocking, made possible by continuity rather than lushness of growth and the absence of severe frost, upsets any easy comparisons between the price of land them and here. Nevertheless it is still a fair contention that land is absurdly cheap (as it is ruinously understocked) in England ; and is not even yet as cheap as it should be in our Antipodes. You can still buy, within sixty miles of London, 2,000 acres of land and a score of houses and many outbuildings for £6,000 to £7,000, perhaps less. *
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