Country Life
HORN AND CORM.
From whatever place they start, whether they write from the study or out of their own experience in "field, factory and workshop," all our agricultural critics, once so diverse, now meet in the same conclusions : first and in general, that we must, as a nation, produce more or perish ; second, and in particular, that a standard price, within moderate fluctuations, is an essential to ordered progress. I remember some years ago seeing the crop from over a hundred acres of potatoes, rotting in the clamps. They had cost any way as much as £16 an acre to produce and were unsaleable. Yet there was no real glut nor was there a great fall in price to the consumer. All that had happened was this : the market was well supplied with English potatoes when a few tons —• a mere bagatelle in the general supply—came over from Holland. The fear of a glut acted like an infectious disease among a small group of wholesale buyers and solely because there were, for a little while, a few more tons than could be easily distributed, farmers were ruined, though the poor were still paying £12 a ton for their potatoes.
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