The Commission of Inquiry into the causes of Agricultural Depression
is much too big for practical purposes, and is furnished, in the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, with too mild, and bovine a chairman. There is no representative of the agricultural labourers on it, and when Mr. Arch was suggested, Sir Stafford Northcote evaded so unpopular an appointment, which would have cost the party many farmers' votes, by saying —hardly, we think, quite ingenuously--that he did not think Mr. Arch would have been accepted by the labourers with any general satisfaction. His mind was running, we think, on another class altogether, not on the labourers. Besides the President, the Duke of Richmond, the Commission contains the Duke of Buccleugh ; Earl Spencer ; Lord Vernon ; Mr. Goschen, M.P. ; Mr. Chaplin, M.P. ; Colonel Kingecote, M.P. ; Mr. Hunter Rodwell, M.P. ; Mr. Cowen, M.P. ; Captain Ritchie, M.P. ; Mr. Mitchell Henry, M.P. ; Mr. Jacob Wilson, of Morpeth ; Mr. Robert Paterson, of Biggar, N.B. ; Mr. Charles Howard, of Bed- ford ; Sir W. Stephenson, K.C.B. ; Professor Bonamy Price ; Mr. W. Stratton, of Warminster ; Mr. John Clay, of Kelso ; and Mr. John Bryce, of Charleville, County Cork. That is a leviathan of a Commission, hardly a working body. Lord Spencer, Mr. Chaplin, Mr. GI °schen, Mr. Hunter Rcalwell, and Professor Bonamy Price would have managed it much better amongst them. You could not expect such an army of un- practised and stubborn intellects to get disciplined into real co-operation under a year or two.
