and root. Except a
few ill-fed sheep, except some small quantities of manure from the
cattle-yards, no human aid, so to say, reaches the much-abused soil.
A crop of green mustard is sometimes ploughed in to decompose and
fertilize, but as it had to be grown first the advantage is
doubtful. The one object is to spend as little as possible upon the
soil, and to get as much out of it as may be. Granted that in
numbers of cases no trickery be practised, that the old rotation of
crops is honestly followed, and no evil meant, yet even then, in
course of time, a soil just scratched on the surface, never fairly
manured, and always in use, must of necessity deteriorate. Then,
when such an effect is too patent to be any longer overlooked, when
the decline of the produce begins to alarm him, the farmer, perhaps,
buys a few hundredweight of artificial manure, and frugally scatters
it abroad. This causes 'a flash in the pan'; it acts as a momentary
stimulus; it is like endeavouring to repair a worn-out constitution
with doses of strong cordial; there springs up a vigorous vegetation
one year, and the next the earth is more exhausted than before.
Soils cannot be made highly fertile all at once even by
superphosphates; it is the inability to discern this fact which
leads many to still argue in the face of experience that artificial
manures are of no avail. The slow oxen, the lumbering wooden plough,
the equally lumbering heavy waggon, the primitive bush-harrow, made
simply of a bush cut down and dragged at a horse's tail--these are
symbols of a standstill policy utterly at variance with the times.
Then this man loudly complains that things are not as they used to
be--that wheat is so low in price it will not yield any profit, that
labour is so high and everything so dear; and, truly, it is easy to
conceive that the present age, with its competition and eagerness to
advance, must really press very seriously upon him.

Most persons have been interested enough, however little connected
with agriculture, to at least once in their lives walk round an
agricultural show, and to express their astonishment at the size and
rotundity of the cattle exhibited. How easy, judging from such a
passing view of the finest products of the country centred in one
spot, to go away with the idea that under every hawthorn hedge a
prize bullock of enormous girth is peacefully grazing! Should the
same person ever go across country, through gaps and over brook