The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-09-04 00:00:00

THE GROUND GAME BILL.

.A. \tof

The Times of Tuesday published the following letter :7

Sir,—As I am laid up with gout and unable to be
present in the House of Lords to-morrow to vote
against the second reading of the Ground Game Bill,
will you allow me through The Times to express my
regret that lam unable to do so? It seems to me
strange that a Government which professes to be
anxious to legislate in accordance with public opinion
should by pressing forward important measures at the
end of August, render it impossible to ascertain what
that public opinion is through the legitimate channel
—the medium of Parliament—when at least one-half
of either House is absent.
-

It is to me clear that Ministers can at this time of
year pass any measure they choose, however un-
popular and however mischievous.
On this ground alone I should have voted against
the second reading, but I should also have done so, as
I think the principle of the Bill, interfering as it des
with freedom of contract, is unsound and pernicious.
More than this, I fear it will fail in its object, an
object which all parties wish to obtain—the limitation
of an excess of ground game. It seems to me this
could be better obtained by arbitration; but in a
letter I cannot ask you to give me space to enter into
detail.
The effect that the present Bill will, I fear, produce
is to sow a suspicious feeling between larallord and
tenant, to make them imagine that their interests
are not identical, to undermine the confidence that at
present exists, arid to cheek the flow of sympathy and
good feeling which is beyond all price.—l remain,
your obedient servant, RUTLAND.
Longshawe-lodge, Sheffield, Aug. 29,

The minority of 20 in favour of Lord Redegdale's
motion agaisst the second reading of the Ground
Game Bill was wholly composed of Conservative
peers. About 30 Conservative peers followed Lord
Beaconsfield out of the Rouse without voting.—Tues-
day's Times,

A large number of extreme High Churchmen have
resolved, when the Burials Bill is passed, to refuse to say
the burial service over the body of any Nonconformist.
Court Journal.
A statue to Denis Papin, the learned physician
who flourished in the first half of the Seventeenth Century,
and whom the French consider as the discoverer of the
motive power of steam, has been inaugurated at Blois, his
native place.

.

THE AMERICAN versus THE ENGLISH

FARMER.
The Times of Monday had the following leader on the joint
report of Mr. Clare Read and Mr. Albert Pell, M.P.,
on the agriculture of the United States and Canada, which
hasnow been published, and ought to be in the hands of every
agriculturist who wishes to form some estimate of an
apparently overwhelming competition:—
The two Assistant Commissioners have very wisely
collected an immense quantity of facts, leaving the
readers to form their own conclusions, towards which,
no doubt, they will be aided by the Royal Commission.
These facts introduce us to a new world. They show
a state of things which even to foreshadow sixty
years ago would have cost a man his reputation
for sanity. At that time we knew some-
thing about American rivers, forests, and
prairies. But how to get at them, how to
people them, how to utilize them, how to elicit the
hidden wealth of inexhaustible nature, send it in a
continuous stream across continent and ocean, and pour
it over these isles, were problems beyond human cal-
culation. They are now the familiar drudgery. and
the daily bread, of a whole people, costing hardly more
care, and involving no greater risk, than the cultiva-
tion of a potato garden. America anticipates, not
without reason, that it will entirely rule our market
for all agricultural produce, dictating prices which
will always be such as to reduce our home competi-
tion to the most harmless dimensions. Wheat is the
point on which the ordinary English farmer has ever
been the most susceptible, and is so still. It is, in a
special sense, the staff of his life. America, with an
enormous and still increasing surplus over her own
wants, sends three-quarters of this surplus to our
ports, and is prepared to make up for the entire failure
of our wheat crop, in the event of such a disaster. The
crop of last year was not so very far from an entire
failure as to make one inconceivable. In such a case
America is simply a benefactor. What the agricul-
turist complains of is that America robs him of his fair
price in ordinary years, denies him the compensation
of a high price when the yield is small, and renders an
abundant crop a positive calamity to the meritorious
producer of it. But while the facts of American com-
petition are certainly portentous enough, English
Imagination adds not a little. It expands the area
of the wheat cultivation to an immeasurable ex-
tent, notwithstanding its fixed limits both of soil
and climate; a very few miles making the difference
between autumn and spring sowing, and, indeed,
between wheat and no wheat. Imagination pictures
an ever increasing supply of labour to those plains
of virgin soil. It credits America with an agricul-
tural system and an industrial class as healthy, as
steady, as docile, and as laborious as ours, only biassed
with opportunities, means, and skill far beyond any
that are possible here. It is important, however, to
separate the truth from the exaggeration, and for this
purpose we could not recommend a more effectual
course than a study of this report, the moderate price
of which would allow of its being read by every
farmer and every labourer desirous of entering into
the question.
The American wheat-grower starts with almost
everything in his favour, especially with those ad-
vantages which the English wheat-grower is apt to
think the most of. He has no rent to pay. He has
no hedges and few fences. The surface is often a dead
level for hundreds of miles. There are comparatively
few weeds, and they have little time to grow. The
soil requires scraping, and no more, There is no need.
of manure, whether chemical or natural. The sow-
ing can be done even while the previous crop of maize
is still standing. The lightness of the crop itself
secures it from some of the casualties to which the
English crop is exposed. The cutting and reaping can
be done by light gear. The straw is of no consequence.
Indeed, it may be burnt on the ground; but is
often the only fuel of the thrashing machine. The
wheels of the implements and of the wagons run easy
over the level, dry ground. The machinery is excel-
lent, uniform, abundant, everywhere obtainable,
easily repaired, and manageable by the most ordinary
hands. Though there are few agricultural labourers
in the professional sense, there are everywhere men
within reach who are glad of wages and a holiday in
the cornfields. A vast ramification of railways, and
of still cheaper canals and rivers, brings all this pro-
duce in continuous streams to the Atlantic. Taking
Chicago as a centre of production, and Liverpool as
a centre of consumption, the traffic is reduced to a
moral certainty, the shortcomings of which can be
easily estimated and discounted. The American
farmer has no need to look about for a good market,
to carry samples with him' and to be particular as to
his customers; he takes his wheat to the station,
whence it ttaken to the elevator, graded—that is,
marked with its proper quality—weighed, and de-
spatched to its distant goal. The American summer
is not the lingering uncertainty of the English season;
it is short and almost invariable, like the working of
a machine in thorough order. Well may the English
wheat-grower envy his Transatlantic 'brother and
despair of rivalry. What, then, is the other side of
the question, if there be another side? In the first
place, there is the fact that this has been going on for
many years, and it cannot be saia that American com-
petition has yet succeeded in driving English wheat
out of the market, or even in rendering it advisable
to substitute other husbandry, except in special cases,
such as the neighbourhood of populous towns. The
average price of wheat for the last forty years is not
discouraging. The report before us throws some light
on this fact. American agriculturists have a very
hard time of it, and there is not that continual rush
into the employment that we see in this county,
where there is hardly a trade, profession, or rank
which does not supply farmers, or persons wishing to
be farmers. After a very few years the virgin soil has
to be deserted, and the cultivators, if such they may
be called, set out on their wanderings westward,
where they have to begin their work again, with some
loss of time, money, and strength. The soil is not so
free from weeds but that they often predominate over
the wheat, indeed to such an extent that not unfre-
quently half the crop is thrashed and half thrown into
the furnace of the thrashing machine. The casualties
in transitu are too familiar to our readers. But the
American continent has its own casualties' which the
English farmer would hardly like to exchange for.
The whole interior is liable to visitation of locusts,
which in a few days, and even hours, destroy every
blade, and render the soil absolutely bare, as if
it had been burnt. There are also other insect
plagues only less destructive. There are tornadoes
that sweep away the crop far and wide. The sum-
mers can be too hot ; they can even be not hot enough.
There are productive and unproductive seasons in
America. The crops are often not worth gathering, and
are then left to rot, or are burnt on the ground. The
supply of labour is always a difficulty, sometimes an
impossibility. The machinery which is the substitute
has to be made very light, and is very apt to fall
out of order, when it is not easily repaired. Partly
fram the want of shelter, partly from the slovenliness
which is said to be a characteristic of the American
farmer, the machinery of all kinds is left exposed to
the elements all the year round, and only discovered
to be unfit for use at the moment when wanted. As
the average American yield of wheat is barely ever
twelve bushels an acre, and there must be many acres
on which it is more, there must also be many acres on
which it is less. There will, probably, be much land
on which the yield does not exceed eight bushels, on
which, consequently, all the operations of husbandry
will take three times as much space, time, and power,
in proportion to the yield, as on every average English
land yielding twenty-four bushels an acre.
Under most unattractive conditions, with very
great hardships, with difficulties that cannot be re-
moved, and risks as great as they ever were, the
American farmer in the Far West can hope to deliver
a quarter of wheat at the nearest depot at 28s. The
freight to Chicago will be 6s. Bd. Thence to New
York it will be ss. 2d. From New York to
Liverpool, including insurance, we suppose, it is
estimated at 4s. 0.1. The " handling " in America
is put at is. id.; the Liverpool charges at 2s. id.
The total is £2 7s. 9-id. for 480 pounds, or very nearly
50s. for 500 pounds. It will at once occur that if these
several items are capable of reduction, they are
capable, also, of accidental, not to say permanent,
increase. The area actually under wheat is always fly-
ing westward, further and still further from the great
centres of trade, and into regions the characteristics of
which are not fully known. Meanwhile the consump-
tion of wheat increases at not less rate than the pro-
duction, for there are not only not many more people,
but of those a larger proportion are bread-eaters.
What, then, is there so very discouraging in the
prospect of a regular and even overwhelming supply
of wheat delivered for consumption at Liverpool at
50s. a quarter? If truth be told, it is the romance of
agriculture that recoils from the dull prospect. The
British farmer is not the dull, plodding animal that
some suppose, and that he would fain appear
sometimes. He does not like fixed conditions and
invariable skies. He loves a few risks, and is in-
deed, reckless in his own way. He would rather
make good hits, drive a good bargain now and then,
and come in for a windfall than just earn his regular
percentage in poor Nature's savings-bank. Even sup-
posing himself safe never to sell his wheat for less
than 455., the farmer feels it a sort of bondage if he is
never to get more than 50s. For his comfort we will
tell him that this report is far from precluding this
hope. The great march of the American corn harvest
over land and sea is beset with so many uncertainties,
present or looming in the future, that we can see no
certainty of American wheat not attaining a much
higher figure. The operations of trade themselves
have laws and vicissitudes of their own. Wheat, more
than other things, is at the mercy of speculation,
which has strange effects and cannot be controlled
—nay, cannot even control itself. The same wheat,
we are told, is often cheaper at New York, than at
Chicago; often cheaper at Liverpool than at New
York. Its price, then, does not depend simply on
the cost of production; nor yet on the demand for
immediate consumption. It is a matter of speculation.
Before the days of railways speculation had to con-
tent itself with attempts to monopolize, one after an-
other, articles of common consumption, wheat most of
all. Of late years fortunes have been made quicker
and easier by railways, banks, and other companies.
Wheat may have its turn once more. Cumbrous as it
is, and hard to keep, it may still be handled to some
purpose ; in which case the British agriculturist will
now and then have some relief from the dull tenour of
50s. a quarter.