The Sun.
London, England, 1856-09-01 00:00:00

of wealth. Faugh ! our gorge rises at it. The world
must have a long lease of existence when, after six
thousand and more years, we find civilisation so
very young, and right and reason to have made
so small an advance. The only question we are
disposed to ask, by way of conclusion, is—how
many crowns the less would be placed on the
EMPEROR'S head if the officiating Patriarch kept
back those• which don't of right belong to his
Imperial master ?

Our future Home Secretary, or Minister
of Education—eur future Premier, perhaps,
one day—is again in the field. A week or
two ago he was the leader at a Reformatory
Union Meeting ; now we have him amongst
farming stock and implements ; and to every one
of the varied branches of social improvement on
which ho speaks bringing no mere off-hand com-
mendations of " this most important object," but
studying carefully beforehand all accessible infor-
mation (and how much is accessible to the wealthy
son of a peer and member of our House of Com-
mons), and leaving every audience he addresses
with clear views of what has been done, and what
wants to be done, and, as far as our state of
knowledge permit; of how it is to be done. The
meeting of the Royal North Lancashire Agricul-
tural Society is, however, an every way appro-
priate occasion for the heir of the Derby estates
and title to show his knowledge of the general
position of Agriculture, and his interest in its
improvement, and especially in the improvement
of that of North Lancashire.
The ablest of the Peelites could not have deli-
vered a speeeh more thoroughly condemnatory of
the policy which Lord DERBY called the present
Parliament together to re-establish, or more com-
pletely turning the " wisdom of Parliament"
sneer of Mr. DISRAELI into well-deserved praise
of the preceding Parliament, than that of Lord
STANLEY, or of Sir J. K. SHUTTLEWORTH.
Why, it appears that farmers are now spending
one million and a half annually for artificial ma-
nures; that they have drained one million acres
of land, and spent 5,000,0001. in the operation
within the last three years, and in the same
period have expended not less than 5,000,0001.
on guano alone ! Ten millions of money spent
in draining and guano—by the men, too, who a
fewyears back spent all their breath in clamouring
for protection ! But that is not all. Farming is
fast becoming what we are accustomed now to call
a manufacture, because hand labour is giving way
rapidly to steam and machinery. At the last
Essex show no less than one hundred and forty-
seven firms exhibited implements, and it
was altogether the largest exhibition of
Agricultural machines which has yet been
made. Since 1850 not less than thirty-five patents
have been taken out for inventions in the single
lino of steam-ploughing ! And since 1852 one
firm alone, Clayton and Shuttleworth, of Lincoln,
have sold thirteen hundred and ninety steam-
engines for agricultural purposes, of an aggregate
horse-power of nearly nine thousand ! These are
cheering facts. They point to the elevation of
the entire agricultural class. Landlords will not
long endure the lag behind little tenants at will.
Wages will improve, as they always do, when the
steam engine is the moving power, saving the
hands and exercising the brains. We even see in
all this a real reform bill. Capital and intelligence
cannot be long worked like political galley-slaves,
and the Sir ROBERTS and Six'. tEARRYS, of the
Grange, and the Lodge, and the Hall, will lao too
much implicated in the course of improvement
themselves, not to catch unawares the spirit of
Reform and to remain Tories in name only.
Great stress was laid at the meeting on what
we had, casually as it happened, called attention
to on Saturday as two main desiderata for Eng-
lish agriculture. Lerd STANLEY asserts that the
great agricultural want is, some easy practical
means of deodorising and concentrating that natu-
ral manure which, wo in this country, almost
wholly waste. Guano must tie exhausted in no
great length of time ; but wherever human beings
exist, what we take from the soil might be almost
entirely replaced, and will be whei necessity
drives us to invent what science shows we chiefly
want. Lord STANLEY tells us, and he is a man
who verifies his statistics carefully, and always
speaks within the mark, that we waste 5,000,0001.
worth of manure in the valley of the Thames
only ! And that the total waste is equal to one-
half, or two-thirds, of the taxation of the country.
We have not the least doubt of it. We believe
the time will soon come when no family
or parish, or town, will think of carelessly
wasting what has so great a commercial
value. We have a California at our own doors
which we persist in ignoring, and under the go-
vernment of Commissi niers of Sewers we are pay-
ing millions to poison our atmosphere with what
wo ought to sell for a sum that would pay our
scavengers' biil. We want, Ist, the cheap deodo-
riser ; 211 y, the cheap and local mechanical device;

3dly, the arrangement for very frequent, we should

say-daily, r3moval. When we think of what may
ba effected by our whole population becoming

aware of the importance of saving manure, this

alone opens a very anti-Malthusian view of the
pressure of the population on the means of sub-

sistence.

Bat this is by no means all. Other improve-
rnents are going rapidly on. DrEdniug and arti-

ficial manures, on a scale never before thought of,

are aceoaipaniei by deeper ploughing and pulveri-

sation of the soil. The value of old Times grand
principle of husbandry, only empiric with him,

but now vindicated by theory, is recognised by
men of science, and is seen to be the principle

of other practices adopted by the farmers,;
theory is now reacting upon practice, and we

shall have in a raw years the soil of the country
drained, manured, and deeply pulverised, to an
extent which, only a very faw years back, was
never thought of. Then there are the reaping
machines for securing what we glow. It was

stated at the meeting that a million of money
was lost by the late stor n, on account of corn
being uncut a; the time it occurred, which ought
to hAve been reaNd. Anoth3r year or two wilt

save U 3 from that loss; and, as we believe, iu a few
years more we shall be devising the means,
chimerical as the suggestion now appears, of plac-

ing the corn cat down by the- reap3r out of the
reach of injury from wat. The business of agri-

cu►ture is to get all it cm out of earth, air, and

sunshine, and to become as independent as mly

be of the irregularities of the seasons. By deep

ploughing and pulverising th© soil, droughts are

renderel much less injurious—draining meats

exce33 of wet for the growing crop—we still
want to lessen ansie4 when the barometer falls,

and our sheaves are yet abroad. Be all this as
it may, Lord STANLEY can now infJrna his father

that the abolition of protection is in the fair way

to render us, if ever we can be so, ind endent
of foreign supplies.

The Hon. Henry E. J. Stlnley, Secretary of Leptiln
at Athens, and formerly attached to the Btltish Era
hassy at Cobstantinople, and Mr. Grevile Richard.
Vernon, of the Foreign Office, accompany Sir Henry
Bulwer in his mission to represent Great Britain in the
settlement of the constitution of- the Danubian Princi-
palities.