# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 5/The harvest

THE HARVEST.
The way in which the prospect of any modern harvest is regarded in this country is a striking evidence of the change which a few years have wrought in our civilisation. At a time within my recollection, when the population of the three kingdoms was only two-thirds what it is now, when the general mind was narrower, and the interests of classes were locked up under protective laws, the question of the harvest was a mere bore in ​anticipation to the greater part of society. The mention of it in the King’s speech was considered a mere form, like the assurance we hear repeated every winter, that we are in a state of amity with foreign powers. The farmers’ complaints really were constant. If the harvest was bad, they pointed to the ruin caused by rain, or drought; saying nothing of the compensation they derived from the artificial high prices under the sliding-scale: and if the harvest was plentiful, they groaned over the low price of corn. So, the farmers’ complaints went for nothing with society generally. When bread was dear, the middle classes felt the misfortune; and so, above all, did the artisan classes. The rural labourers were fed from the rates, and were kept so low always that the character of the harvest made little difference to them. Scarcely a year passed without applications to parliament about agricultural distress, so that the evil seemed to be a necessary and interminable one; and people turned from it in hopelessness. They did not seek to know beforehand what the harvest was likely to be in any year; and when the point was settled, they had nothing to say to it but to lament or rejoice over dear or cheap bread, without looking further than their own account-book and baker’s shop. The wide range of ideas which millions of minds now run over when the mention of the coming or past harvest occurs, was not then opened to the many. It is not very many years ago (I think it was shortly before the repeal of the corn laws), that I heard a clergyman, kind-hearted and active-minded, and the son of a bishop, say with a smile of complacency, that he was not troubled by the menace of a ruined harvest.
“We hear the same thing every few years,” he observed; “and you know there always is a harvest.”
“Yes,—for you,” I replied.
I took leave to tell him that his remark was unbecoming a clergyman; for the moral condition of the people is the clergyman’s first business: and if he did not know, he ought to have known, that a bad harvest meant increase of crime, as well as infliction of misery. In later times, when I have observed the general understanding established throughout the nation, in regard to the common interest in a good harvest, and the precise bearings of the fact, the self-satisfied composure of that well-meaning clergyman (which he mistook for piety) has recurred to me, with undiminished surprise that within twenty years such insensibility should have prevailed on such a subject.
The last and present year furnish a capital test of our improved knowledge and sense, as well as our improved circumstances. If ever there was a dreary year for farmers it was 1860; and it followed a sufficiently trying one in 1859. Yet we hear nothing of the grumbling of the farmers. They are no longer thought bores, or worse, as a class favoured by the laws and the aristocracy, and yet never contented. The invidious favour is gone; and with it everything that was unmanly in the character of the order. Their business is no longer a lottery, as the corn laws and our agricultural ignorance made it till fifteen years ago. Farmers have now to seek their fortunes as other men of business do,—by relying on their own sense, knowledge, and industry; and they have already arrived at being able largely to control or counteract the caprices of the weather, which were their plea formerly for taxing all bread-eaters, to save bread-growers from loss. I do not know how it strikes less old-fashioned people, but I own that nothing has been more impressive to me during these two remarkable years, than the dignified bearing of the farmers of the country. They have had serious losses to bear; and something worse than other classes have to endure in sustaining losses. A merchant is subject to bad debts and unfortunate issues to speculations: but the loss comes, as it were, in a lump. A certain portion of his property is gone; and his expectations are mortified. The farmer has to endure the protracted trial of seeing his property go; and his mortifications, in a bad year, are drawn out from day to day, till the seasons have run their round. What the trial is can hardly be conceived by dwellers in towns, to whom the result comes in the dear loaf, and the beef and mutton at 10d. or 1s. the lb. Where I sit, and look abroad over a rural scene, it is much easier to sympathise with the farmer. There are the fields into which no seed could be got last autumn before the frosts came. In yonder homesteads and cottages, the labourers sat round the fire for weeks after Christmas, till the women were heartily tired of their being always in the way: but they had nothing to do out of doors; and the farmers saw all their possessions locked up, as it were, from their natural uses. For a few weeks in February and March everybody was busy, and the proprietors of land and stock more hopeful. They would have no autumn sown crops; but they must make the most of the spring; and the hard and prolonged frost had benefited the soil, and must have destroyed much vermin. If the spring grasses did but turn out well, it might be a fair year yet. But then came the drought. In our part of the island it rained only three or four times between Easter and July. Day after day the farmer looked in vain for the growth of his grass. It did not seem to grow at all. April, May, and even June passed on, and the hill sides showed no tinge of the vivid green which signals the herds and flocks to the upland pastures. Buying and buying, all through the spring, to feed the beasts who ought to be grazing,—each week hoping for rain and green grass, and none coming,—this is a trial of patience. The cereals came up thin and straggling, and withered more and more under the drought: and the grass in the hayfields was thinly in flower, while the undergrowth remained stationary. At last, when all resources for feeding the cattle were about exhausted, the rain came. Everybody cheered up. The cereal crops might yet make up for lost time, or quality might compensate for quantity: and as for the hay,—it must be in part seeded grass, and in part too short; but there would be a crop by waiting three weeks for it. But it so happened that the rain, having once arrived, scarcely stopped; and it was so heavy as to be very mischievous. Where light and poor hay crops were got in at ​the usual time, there has been excellent grazing since. It is quite a spectacle,—the sleek enjoyment of the kine in their pasture of vivid green, when the rains intermit so as to let them graze. But the whole chapter of the hay is dismal. Even where the mowing machine was used, the grass lay soaking and drying alternately for weeks. In the bright morning the haymakers trooped out, and worked till noon, when the clouds hurried up and spoiled all. Or, after a rainy morning, and a bright clearing at noon, all hands would go to work for as long as they could see; but before sunset they were driven home by wet, which lasted all night and for days afterwards. In half a dozen fields and meadows I have seen parties of labourers at work for weeks, at four or five shillings a day each, in this useless way. I have seen no small quantity, cut and made at this cost, choking up the channel of the brook, or swimming in the flood. I have seen it turning brown and grey on the ground, and then almost black, till it seemed hardly worth carrying; and, finally, I saw on Sunday a party of haymakers sent into the field after church,—a thing never done but in extremity,—and, after working for a couple of hours, driven away by the pitiless rain. All this time the oats and potatoes have been a great anxiety to the farmer. The promise of both was very fine; but the grain is prostrated under the rain and strong winds, and the root has rotted. Now, these things must be admitted to be as trying to human patience as can well be. If the farmer had been told on New Year’s-day that his loss in the year would amount to so much, he might bear it as the manufacturer puts up with a sudden depreciation in the value of his stock, and the merchant with a bad debt: but the long and varying suspense, and the singular aspect of spitefulness in the weather of such years as the two last, certainly constitute a peculiar trial to the farmer. As far as I can learn, our countrymen bear it with true British manliness. We used to hear of agriculture “coming to Parliament whining for protection.” Now that protection is over, we hear no more about whining. Every order of producers is now above it.
As for society generally, it has come to understand the bearings of a good or a bad harvest. Of a good harvest I need say nothing; for it speaks for itself. A bad one, we now know, means, in the first place, the throwing away of several millions of money. We generally spend twenty millions in the purchase of grain and flour. We do not grudge it, though it is an unproductive expenditure. We do not grudge it because we cannot (or we suppose we cannot) grow enough at home for our consumption; and of course we must in the first place be fed. But we feel differently when we have to spend another ten or twelve millions in buying as much grain as we have seen rotting or failing in our own fields. The failure of last year’s harvest has cost us in actual money twenty millions more than the average expenditure: and every man of intelligence now, clergy or lay, understands what this means. Instead of simpering and averring that “there always is a harvest,” the most exclusive members of society know that this tremendous loss of capital restricts expenditure through all ranks, sets everybody economising, slackens manufacture, diminishes earnings, and affects the money market injuriously by carrying away our gold to foreign countries: for we must have the grain and flour, whether the countries which produce it can or cannot take any of our products in exchange. If they do not want our goods, we must pay in gold. In short, put it in any way you like, the badness of last year’s harvest caused us a dead loss of twenty millions direct; besides inflicting a variety of inconveniences and troubles.
The special trial of this year has been the uncertainty. Last autumn, and the frosts of midwinter, taught us that we could not have a harvest above the average: but whether an average, or how much less, has been a question almost to the last moment. It will even now take some weeks to satisfy us of our precise position; but we are certain that, on the whole, we are not unfortunate, and that at last we have left behind us the mischiefs of the bad harvest of 1860. We should still have felt them if we had had a second such harvest, because the protracted competition with other nations in the grain market would have made foreign wheat and flour very costly to us. Now that we shall want to buy little more than our regular quantity, we and the French shall not be bidding against each other, constantly enhancing the price of food to each other.
I never remember the reports of the crops being more various than they have been since the spring equinox. Up to that time, all the news from all quarters was equally bad. A very small proportion of our farmers had, by a thorough and systematic use of agricultural machinery, got their harvest cleared away, and their seed in, in spite of the malice of the weather; and where this was best done, the wheats stood the winter best. The less advanced practitioners made nothing of their land at all, and could only hope for an early and favourable spring.
It would be difficult to say what the spring was, for the whole season has been singularly various in different parts of our islands. In parts of Scotland my description of our drought and rains would be testified to as a fair account of the spring and summer; while in other places the spring has been wet and the summer dry, or each has been both. On the whole, by what I can gather from the sum of agricultural reports, the wheat crop is decidedly below an average, but a considerable portion of it of remarkably fine quality. The unfitness of last year’s barley for malting purposes was an evil of wide operation. This year, the quality is supposed to be very fine.
Some people tell us that oats are now about the best crop; but the real character of the whole oat crop is never known much before the end of September; and there is certainly a good deal so laid and broken as to be scarcely susceptible of cutting,—yellow, matted, and almost mouldy near the ground. The fate of the potato came upon us almost like a surprise,—so fine was the promise up to July. It is a great misfortune; but we shall feel almost as if we deserved it till we have either discovered the nature of the disease, or left off running the risks of potato-growing for some years till we can begin afresh, with new sets on a ​renewed soil. Till we obtain either the knowledge or a pause in the growing we may expect an annual disappointment: for we do at least know that there is some cause which appears to be permanent.
We hear other roots ill spoken of this year. That mangold should fail is a serious misfortune to cattle and their owners. The failure is certainly not universal, though by all accounts it must be very wide spread. I know of some which grew rather patchy after the drought, but has had no drawback since, and promises to be fine. Two causes are assigned for such failure as there is. The seed from last year’s crop was not properly ripened, and very improperly mixed with the weeds which flourished so rankly; and a new maggot has been feasting itself in the inside of the leafstalks, destroying the plant in the most insidious way. Carrots have failed from bad seed: and turnips, which up to a late date promised well, come out badly from examination,—the roots having run to “fingers and toes,” as the country folk say. Beans are bad; peas fine. So say the majority of reporters; but there is scarcely any assertion about any crop which is not matched with a precisely opposite account from some part of the country. The only general statement which can be relied on is that, on the whole, light lands and their produce have done well, and clay lands and their crops less well than on the average.
Our fortune is therefore moderately good only, in regard to the produce of the country this year. The year has, however, done much to improve our prospect in time to come.
First, we have got a Drainage Bill, which, if made the most of, will effect much towards that Arterial Drainage which is now the chief want of British agriculture. The bill went so quietly through parliament that it may be doubted whether there is as yet any due appreciation of the powers which it gives. Under it, the energetic portion of the proprietors of any district needing drainage can effect their object by application to the Enclosure Commissioners, through whose intervention they can obtain a private Act of Parliament in an inexpensive, ready, and secure manner. No obstructive neighbour need now be allowed to spoil land, and ruin health, and fill the churchyard, by forbidding the waters to pass his property. We cannot expect to have everything on the first asking; and this bill does not give us a systematic emendation of our watercourses, from their spring-heads in the hills to their outfall into the sea: but it enables private enterprise to improve large areas by effectual drainage; and it removes the antique and vexatious impediments by which the welfare of the many, living above and below, has been sacrificed to the selfishness or ignorance of some one proprietor, or some clique of gentry, strong in will, who would not listen to reason. It will not now be the fault of the law if we suffer hereafter as we have suffered till now from floods in critical seasons, and bogged land all the year round, for want of efficient watercourses. We ought to see, for years to come, a great straightening, and clearing, and deepening of the channels of our streams,—a great strengthening of the banks,—a great substitution of steam for water-mills, and consequent abolition of weirs,—each spoiling more land than any mill can be worth.
This Drainage Act is one great gain of this year. Another is the prodigious extension of the use of agricultural machinery. There is nothing like bad weather for convincing husbandmen of the benefit of machinery which saves time. The lesson of last November, with its brief seeding-time, has shown its effects in the wide adoption of almost every kind of new and approved implement. One appears, to be stared at, here and there in the most old-fashioned corners of the island; while, in the neighbourhood of the great manufacturing towns, some costly instrument is seen on its journey to a field, hired by a party of allotment-holders, to mow, or reap, or plough, or sow quickly for them, at their joint expense.
The phenomena of rural labour are becoming more remarkable every year. The faster the use of machinery spreads, the more deficient does labour become. We hear suggestions of letting soldiers be employed in harvest-labour, and the few able-bodied inmates of workhouses. We hear with satisfaction of emigrants returning from America, since the civil war there began. The Irish who come over for haymaking and harvest are fewer and fewer; and if any of them are found begging, it is because they have come to a district where their work is better done by modern methods. When we obtain the system of returns of agricultural statistics, which cannot be much longer withheld by the prejudices of the less instructed class of farmers, there will presently be no spare labour anywhere, because it will be evenly distributed; and the total amount is already insufficient for our needs,—great as is the amount of work saved by machinery. Where agriculture is most advanced labour is most readily absorbed, and best paid.
The failure of the mangold this year has directed attention towards a mistake which has been admirably exposed in France, where the error has been greater than with us. While growing desperate under the ravages of insects, we have been destroying their natural enemies, the small birds. Several agricultural societies in France have been petitioning the legislature to protect the small birds which the peasantry destroy for food,—causing the devastation of whole acres of grain and roots for the sake of half-a-dozen bird-pies. Our cottagers do not feed on robins and sparrows; but too many people kill the small birds because they destroy sprouting vegetables, and help themselves to the food of the poultry. Then we hear dismal tales of the wireworm, and the maggot which has been so fatal to the mangold this year. The discussion about the wireworm, and various aphides, and the grub of the cockchafer bids fair to preserve the races of small birds in this country, and to restore them in France. It promises, moreover, to restrict the meddling of game-preservers within due bounds. They have destroyed owls, weasels, and polecats in such numbers as to have increased the rats and mice beyond all endurable bounds,—injuring hedges and ditches, and ravaging crops till the mischief is seen, in bad seasons, in its full enormity.
In France, the deficient crops are avowedly owing, to no small extent, to the unchecked ​ravages of insect plagues; and in England, the gamekeepers are shown how they are ruining their neighbours’ crops and fences without saving their eggs, young birds, and leverets, which fall a prey to rats more than they would to weasels and hawks, and owls, if these latter were allowed to make war on the rats and mice.
We have, when all is said, to be thankful for a tolerable harvest which will preclude hardship, though we cannot consider it a rich one, fit to elate the spirits of the nation. We may congratulate ourselves on having made some progress towards obtaining future harvests, more ample amidst the chances and changes of weather than our fathers won from the most golden summers. We have surmounted the misfortunes of last year better than we could have expected: and its adversity has taught us to make ourselves more secure for the future. If the year between this harvest and the next is to be a season of national trial, it will not be from failure of the nation’s bread.