The Express.
London, England, 1853-09-17 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

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LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17.

A L: ADM: topic at the Agricultural Meetings now
taking place all over the country, is the extension of
the use of machinery in agriculture. There is every
reason why it should be so. The inventors of new
machines are in the state of natural exaltation which
is characteristic of inventors, and always interesting
and agreeable in the eyes of bystanders. The pur-
chasers of new implements arc delighted with the
fre,.h facilities they have obtained. And all farmers
have sonactli:ng to say at present about the rise of
wages and the scarcity of labour. When the poor
labourers of Dorsetshire and Wiltshire arc plucking
up spirit to demand more than six or seven
shillings a week they somehow sustained life
upon, and ambitiously soar to the ideal of ten or
twelve, the great day of machinery has

certainly arrived. In the manufacturing world
it is a notorious fact that every great labour-saving
invention within this century has been directly due
to a strike fur wages. In the rural world, emigra-
tion is answering the purpose of strikes, where it
does not immediately produce them. The Irish
reapers now failing us, the workhouses having been
empties' of the able-bodied, so that the old men left
are not enough to draw the water, and weed the
grass-grown yards, the demand for labour-saving im-
plements is more pressing from season to season. I
The maker of a particular scarifier, who sold about
150 in a year, five years ago, now sells between 800
and 900. A manufacturer of steam engines now sells
150 in a year, the demand being 15 five years since.
Others report that they sell four-fold, five-feld,
eight-fold what was required three or four
years ago ; and the increase in the lees costly
implements is great in proportion ; and the com-
plaints of inability to execute orders fast enough are
so many that there is no doubt of a continued eaten.
mien for a long time to come.
Side by side with these statements, we have still
complaints of the backwardness of the farmers.
Whole districts are pointed out, where the work of
tillage goes on just in the same way as in the time
of our fathers; the old wooden plough, with an
absurd team and set of human attendants; the old
miry ways about the farm; the hand hoeing, the
threshing with the flail, the mowing with the
scythe; the long exposure of the hay; the waste of
every kind in reaping, and so forth. And at agricul-
tural meetings now, there is always a speaker who
points out the undeniable advantages of dozens
and scores of implements, and hopes to live to see the
day when every farmer will, as a matter of
course, supply himself with • complete set
of labour-saving machinery. It is wonderful that
no one of the yet unsupplied farmers does not get up
and read to the meeting a list of prices of implements
and then ask—if such a question were still needful
—how farmers sre to buy such costly affairs. The
steam engine costs 5001. to begin with, if the farm is
large enough to make it, according to current
notions, worth while. The drill for such a farm
costs 401. ; rollers from 111. to 18/. ; a reaping machine
from 171. to 20/., and so on. Now if, after all this
outlay, such machines as SAMUELSON'd digger are to
be added, the farmer may well ask where the capital
is to come from. He must go on paying for human
labour from week to week because he is really unable
to purchase labour in its concentrated form. He
must do the best he can with his land according to
the old methods, for ho cannot wait for the increased
productiveness which would ensue from improved
methods. He has eyes, like other people,
and can see what the advantages of high
farming with first-rate apparatus can produce ; but
he cannot pretend to compete with it. He must do
the best he can, and let himself be outstripped, be-
cause he cannct help it. Ho is as the handloom
weaver to the power-loom manufacturer; and he
must put up with the lot of the small capitalist in
the presence of the large one. Such is the farmer's
plea. Can we admit it and rest upon it? Must we
be satisfied with it?
We must remember that circumstances have

changed since agricultural machinery began to at-
tract much attention. Our workhouses were then
full in winter, and the rates were a serious burden
to the farmer. Together with the machinery, the'
number of labourers was growing; and the imme-
diate consequence, though not the ultimate, was
likely to be that as much as was saved by the use of
machinery, might have to be spent in the maintenance
of displaced labourers. The case is radically altered
by the draining away of labourers by emigra-
tion. What is saved from poor-rates will
be paid away in increased wages, with
such a further probable demand, that the farmers
must incur, it is believed, an expenditure which will
very soon exceed what the most costly machinery
could take out of their capital. Taking the whole
kingdom together it has been computed that the
saving in poor rates and the anticipated reduction in
the price of guano, would pay the interest of the
capital invested in so much machinery as would com-
pensate for the abstraction of labour. Now, is there
no way in which the advantages of the general an
of machinery can be secured ? Gentlemen at agri-
cultural meetings hope to see every farm stocked
with a complete set ; and a multitude of farmers re-
spond that it will never be done in their day—that the
thing is an impossibility. Is there no way of recon-
ciling the difficulty

In every other leading business of life, men
are finding out the economy of association.
Gentlemen began with their club-houses, many
years ago, and now artisans are feeling the
benefit of the principle and method in their
model lodging houses, their baths and wash houses,
and wherever the experiment has been fairly tried
of making a complete and first rate apparatus answer
the need of numbers, instead of a very poor and de-
teethe apparatus being supplied to each of a multi-
tude who have the same want. A system of gas
lighting gives to each room of a vast mansion an all-
sufficient light at less coat than the old farthing'
candle ; and the clothes of a whole pariah may now
b.: washed, dried, and ironed by an American appa-
ratus fur a fraction of the wet, in money and time,
that formerly half cleansed the apparel of a single
courtful of people. What is there in agricultural
apparatus that need exclude it from the economy of
association ? Why should not there be depiits of it,
whence it might be let out on hire ?
Mast implements are abundantly moveable, and
therefore loanable, and all may be made move-
able. The obvious difficulty is that the same
instrument is wanted by everybody nearly at the
same time ; but there is some margin left—a dif-
ference, perhaps, of three weeks between the earliest
and latest ploughing or sowing, or mowing or reap-
in,r, in the same district. And there is, besides, the
main virtue of machinery to l considered—the
speed of its operation. lty the new digging machine
a 2 acre of soil has been turned into a seed-bed in

eighty minutes. Of course this speed facilitates the
process of lending ; and it is clear that a small
number of machines may supply a much greater
number of cultivators, even in regard to those pri-
mary processes which depend upon season and
weather. The margin is much broader fur those
secondary acts which may be done one day as well
as another—threshing, chaff-cutting, cake-crushing,
and even scarifying and hoeing. From the mere
aspect of the case, combined with experience of what
has been done in other lines of human action, it
seems almost certain that there will be, ere long,
centres of agricultural machinery, whence farmers
may derive what aid they need in its season, and
where, no doubt, great fortunes will be made by ma-
chinists, or some intermediate class which will pre-
sently rise up, and offer its services to perfect the
connexion between the tillers of the soil and the
makers of their tools. The first adventurers who
planted magazines in the Hanse towns and the ports
of Italy and England a few centuries ago rose to be
the chiefs of a new social and political interest; and
some great function, or at least great fortune,
may be reserved for those who will, by establishing
magazines of labour, facilitate the application of me-
chanical resources to the production of human food.
If this were done now, and the trade in guano were
extended, we might presently add to the prosperity
of the farmers as a class, and increase enormously the
growth of food in England.

CIIOLERA.