AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2551, 12 June 1882, Page 4

AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION.

A Norfolk farmer has gent the following letter to the secretary of the Farmers’ Alliance, with permission to publish it: After so many repeated applications for my •übsoription, I feel I must write you the cause why I have not paid it. It is not because I do not believe in the Farmers’ Alliance, hut simply and solely the want of money. Perhaps you may say the subscription is too small to make that excuse. That I admit; but ia these times one is obliged to cut down every expense, and then can barely get enough out of the land to pay imperative demands. lam a tenant-farmer, and began business four years ago. We laid our money into the farm, which wo euppossd was going to pay it* way and a little to spare. My wife and myself have worked hard, and still lost money. It you ask me what has been the cause of my ill fortune in farming, my reply is, mainly high rent and tithe. Many have complained of the bad seosons, and would make out them to be the main cause of the repression in agriculture; but I maintain that, with the ordinary seasons which we have had of late, business farmers, with fair rents, no tithe, and no so-called poor rates, would have been able to pay their way. In my opinion many farmers have made a groat blunder in the wholesale use of artificial manure. After living fifteen years on heavy land, four of which have been in business for myself, I have proved that in nine oases out of ten their use has been a heavy loss to the farmer; but I suppose the farmer’s loss in that case has been the maker’s gain, I wish they would kindly return me only half what I have lost by the use of their manures. For the future farmers had better attend to making their own farm-yard manure better, and lay their land down instead of growing peas and beans ; and keep more sheep, then I think they will be much better off. Mr C. 8. Bead, after his return from America, •aid that “if English farmers rose as early in the morning, worked as hard, dressed xu shabbily, and lived as close as the American Tanners, they would succeed better.” Now I have lived with and worked with several American farmers, but I did not see that they worked harder, dressed more shabbily, and lived closer than many of my neighbors and myself. If he had said, Give English farmers aa good a chance as Americans, viz.—cheap land, free from tithe and poor rates, with security, freedom, and compensation, and then advised us to get up early, work hard, dress shabbily, and live close, I should have believed hia doctrine. Bo long as English fanners are burdened as many of them now are, good seasons may come and go, bat they will not be much richer. If seasons have everything to do with it, as many landlords tell ns, 1 should like to know where the wealth is now that the farmers accumulated daring the good seasons preceding 1876 or 1877.