THE FAILURE OF FARMING IN ENGLAND.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1860, 9 February 1880, Page 3

THE FAILURE OF FARMING IN ENGLAND.

The " Times " publishes an article on the failure of the crops in England this year. It states that the United Kingdom will probably consume about 24,000,000 quarters this year, but it has only produced about a quarter of this at home available for consumption, and ■will, therefore, have to import the remainder —that is, 18,000,000 quarters —from foreign countries. This certainly is an enormous sum ; yet, after all, there is no reason to loot upon it with alarm. We have not failed to do justice to the farmer's difficulty or to his place in his social system, but we will venture to ask what the condition of this country would have been now had it entirely deoended on its own harvest and had no foreign supplies to draw upon to make good its own failure. Nobody haß suggested even a doubt that our people will be fed this year as well as they were last, though we may have to purchase from our neighbours, far and near, four million more quurtera of wheat than last year. We Bhall have to pay foreigners fifty millions in discharge of the year's bread bill, with what commercial and financial results we leave economists to exercise their wits upon. It is impossible not to connect this enormous estimate with the operation witnessed by the Agricultural Commission in the territory of Dakota. The single farm of Oasselton, under one management, and handy for communication with the rest of the world, is calculated to produce a quarter of a million quarters of whoat annually. We are still very far from exhaußting the resources of this earth and from fulfilling its destinies. Year by year our relations with its various inhabitants become closer and more interesting. We cannot do without them, or they without us. It is but a few years ago that a dependence on distant foreigners to the amount of fourteen millions of quarters, costing, we will say, £35,000,000, would have been thought an awful jeopardy, and a base servitude. Such was our case last year, and in the press of more lively matter it passed almost unobserved. Oartainly England haß not been conscious during the last twelvemonth of being on its laat legs, or having its wings dipt, or suffering any special disability. It has spoken, and acted too, as freely as ever, though " dependent on the winds and waves," as the phraso used to run, and on the fickle paßsion of man, for considerably more than half its daily bread.