GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 4!

pictures, prints, interesting portraits, gallery of sculpture,
gardens, with the rarest exotics, collected and maintained at a
vast expense." Almost every county had at least one Woburn and
a dozen or score of hereditary mansions on a smaller but com-
parable scale.

Such houses were the headquarters of what was still the
chief industry of England—agriculture. From their estate
offices a great national interest was directed. During the past
eighty years its productivity had been immeasurably increased.
New and revolutionary methods of farming and stockbreeding
had been introduced and nearly seven million acres of waste
land reclaimed by enclosure. A German traveller in the eighteen-
twenties was amazed on each successive visit to England to see
vast tracts of formerly uncultivated land transformed into fine
corn-bearing fields. It was during these years that Tennyson's
northern farmer was engaged on his long and manly task of
stubbing of "Thurnaby waaste." It was all part of a tremendous
national achievement. Though the population had doubled itself
since 1760 and England had ceased to be a corn exporting country,
more than three-quarters of its total wheat and nearly all its
barley consumption were being met by the home producer.

By their agricultural activity and inventiveness the English
had not only given an example to the world but saved them-
selves. The new jnethods of breeding stock, the increase of
grazing, the use of fodder crops on lands formerly left fallow,
fencing, building and draining, contributed as much to the defeat
of a militant and revolutionary France as the broadsides of
Trafalgar and the stubborn squares of Waterloo, Without them
the rising populations of the new manufacturing towns could
never have been fed nor the power of Napoleon humbled. The
accumulated experience of all this mighty effort had now been
elevated into a science: the annual gatherings at Holkham to
toast the great Coke of Norfolk who had turned thousands of
acres of rabbit warren iato a smiling countryside, the ceaseless
output of books on improved methods of farming and the
foundation of the Royal Agricultural Society in 1838 were among
its many symptoms.

One best saw the industry in its corporate capacity on market-
day in any country town—the old market hall, the country
women's stalls and baskets spread about the roadway, the gentry
and tenant farmers in their John Bull top-hats, loose open frock-