THE POSSIBLE REVOLUTION IN AGRICULTURE.
WE are not generally much interested in accounts of the "marvellous growth" of western cities in America, or of northern cities in England. The new "cities" in the Union are generally big depots for their surrounding districts, and in England big factories or foundries, and no more interesting, till time has civilised them, than huge warehouses, or foundries, or factories usually are. Men are not much the happier or the nobler because, in hope of gain, they have placed their houses thick on the ground. It is impossible, however, to read such an account as Mr. Higginson has given in Wednesday's Times of the condition of Chicago and Illinois, without feeling once more that British agriculture is just now working in presence of a competition of the most terrible kind. This one State of Illinois is, in fact, a huge competing farm, a fertile, deep-soiled prairie, almost as large as the whole of England, in which fields can still be obtained for a price which, in this country, would seem almost nominal, and in which the whole energy of an industrious English and German population is devoted to raising grain for the Euro- pean market. Already they raise 270,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, or three times the English wheat crop, and 30,000,000 bushels of wheat, equal to a third of our whole harvest, and this while there are still 640,000,000 of fertile acres in the State untouched by the plough. The city of Chicago, with its 500,000 inhabitants, lives by collecting, storing, and dispatching, all this produce, with enor- mous stores of flesh-meat besides ; and the first thought of the whole State is, by building railroads, by re- ducing fares, and by cutting canals, to reduce the only weight,—the cost of transit,—which burdens the Illinois farmer in the competition. One new canal, it is said, for example, will reduce the cost of freight 5s. a ton ; while, as we know from other sources than Mr. Higginson, it is quite possible that the railways may be compelled by public feeling to keep to their present low rates of freight, or even to submit those rates to direct popular control. And this is only one State of the Union. No sooner have we read this account, than we see that Colorado is exporting a barley so adapted for malting purposes that it instantly fetches the highest price in the English market ; and this is not finished, before we stumble on a letter declaring, from personal know- ledge, that Chicago can ship good meat to Liverpool at a price which will enable it to be sold there at 31-d. a pound. These may all be exaggerations, and are exaggerations, insomuch as some obstacles are left out of sight ; but every week shows some improvement in this particular line of com- munication, till it really seems possible that within five years Illinois farmers, paying, say, the equivalent of a rental of 2s. an acre, against the English average of £1, and re- quiring scarcely any imported manure, will be placed in direct competition with English farmers, and with no weight to carry beyond a freight not more than equivalent to a 5s. rental per acre. It cannot be denied that this is a terrible prospect for the British farmer, who, if this rain lasts, and it seems as if it would never leave off, will, in October next, have to meet a fourth bad harvest, with markets glutted with cheap American wheat, with American barley preferred to his own, and with dead meat of the second quality sold at prices at which he cannot grow the living animal.
We do not wonder that the drift of all things agricultural being in this direction, farmers should be almost in despair, that landlords should think themselves "well out of the scrape" with a ten-per-cent. reduction, or that observers should speak plainly of a coming "social revolution." It may be coming. It is very difficult to avoid the belief—though it may prove untrue—that England under this tremendous com- petition must be cultivated on some new system ; that the cultivator, to speak plainly, must throw off some burden or another in order to get on at all, and may throw off the landlord. It seems almost impossible that a moderate reduction of rent should meet the difficulty, or that any new method should enable tillers of an old soil like ours, needing much manure, and burdened with heavy rents, and all the cost of an old civilisation, to compete with the owners of a new world of deep, amble soil, which it will take fifty years of careless cultivation to injure seriously, for which they scarcely pay, and which, with the help of machinery, the owners almost cultivate for themselves. We know too well how solid this hierarchical society of ours is, how often it has survived difficulties that seemed insuperable. the owners holding on through everything, till at last the "times came round" either to attempt prediction or to believe thoroughly in pessimist prophecy ; but still it does look as if land in England could be cultivated only by its owners, and as English society is based on the theory that it can be cultivated by tenants paying £67,000,000 a year to a class which does not directly work, that change would be a "social revolution." We see this possibility clearly, and do not wonder either at regrets or at exaggerations, but we confess we do wonder at some of the arguments based upon the anticipation of such a change. Where, for example, is the reasonableness of saying that if it occurs, England will be dependent upon foreign countries for her supply of food, and must modify her foreign policy accordingly ? Why should England produce less because rent falls, say, to make the catastrophe more visible, to 5s. an acre, or the farms are purchased at low rates by farmers themselves ? What ground is there for expecting land to be thrown out of cultivation ? It can never be the landlord's interest to let it lie waste, and as to the tenant, there must be a point at which he can grow corn on equal terms with his rival in Illinois, who must be weighted with some freight, at all events. Suppose the British farmer a freeholder of cheap land seventy miles from London. Surely he can compete with the Illinois man, seventy miles from Chicago and 3,000 from London. No possible improvement in commu- nication can then put him at a disadvantage, or make his occupation, if profitable to his Illinois rival, less than profitable also to himself. A great and powerful class may be im- poverished, or even extirpated, by the change, and Great Britain may suffer grievously in every department of life for want of a wealthy and leisured class devoted to politics ; but the suffering, however keen, would not affect the supply of food. The national wealth might be diminished to a terrible extent by the loss in the selling value of land, but the national crop would not be diminished by a bushel. Farmer Greenacre would not grow less, because he paid no rent. The landlords cannot leave land waste in a fit of pique with Nature and events, nor would farmers, because they got land cheap, and could only, as business men, afford to buy it cheap, be neces- sarily either poorer or less competent cultivators. The dream of England going out of cultivation is a dream merely, at least if it is to go out of cultivation out of dread of competi- tion. No competition could do more than destroy the present ability of the land to yield rent, in addition to the cultivator's living and interest on his capital. Nor, we confess, do we see the force of the Pall Gaz-ette's statement that the dependence of England on foreign nations for food may become, as the old Protectionists argued, inconsistent with a dignified foreign policy. That is a very serious argument. We might differ with our contemporary as to the true objects of foreign policy, but we should, like him, consider the inability to pursue one, a heavy make-weight to be reckoned in the calculation against Free-trade, but how has Free-trade altered our position as a militant people ? Under the strictest Protectionist re'gime, we were always liable to an enormous war-tax in the shape of a high price for grain, and we fought part of the last war with Napoleon with wheat above a hundred shillings a quarter? What worse than that could happen to us ? At that price, and much less, India, Australia, South America, the European continent, would pour corn upon our shores. Mere war, indeed, could not prevent corn from coming, for it would be shipped for France and Norway, and come thence with only a slight addition in the way of freight ; but even supposing the United States, in a paroxysm of wrath, to place a prohibitory duty upon export, or prohibit it altogether, and compensate growers, corn, while the seas were open, would always come in to Britain. It is the price which would be so heavy, and that price we always, in grave wars, have had to pay. Besides, has Free-trade diminished the quantity of food grown ? It has immensely increased the need of foreign supplies, because it has encouraged a great growth of population ; but it has not diminished the positive quantity, nor, according to our previous argument, can it ever do so, for the decline of rent or the overthrow of the land- letting system cannot diminish cultivation. It would be terrible, indeed, to be dependent on one Power for food, or to have the seas closed against us ; but neither of those proba- bilities has been increased by Free-trade, but rather dimin- ished. The English people could go to war now with as much safety as ever, and with these immense advantages : that unless the war were with America food would remain cheap, and that our numbers have increased to a point of which the Pro- tectionist regime would not have allowed. That the old Free- traders talked nonsense about the permanent disuse of war, and absurdly exaggerated the "humanising effect" of Free- trade, must be allowed by the most devoted of Free-traders. The greatest war of our time, that between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union, was waged between States which had never had a dividing customs- line, in which Free-trade was as perfect as in the Boman Empire ; while the Italian States, walled in from each other by fiscal laws, nevertheless all rushed together. Wars arise out of human nature, and not out of custom-house regu- lations; and the Free-traders, with their reign of universal peace, were but dreaming of Utopia. But that does not prove that their policy has rendered war impossible, or even bound over Great Britain to show meekness of spirit in dealing with the nations. Her people will not fight the worse because they have plenty of cheap food, nor will her armies be more dis- organised than of yore because they will be fed. Her true and single difficulty is the want of organising brain,—and certainly, Protection never yielded that valuable article.
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