CHAPTER SEVEN
"Lest We Forget!"

"If you're planning for one year plant grain; if
you're planning for ten years plant trees; if you're
planning for a hundred years plant men."

— Old Chinese Proverb.

t I *HE summer of 1879 was ^e worst recorded in modern
I times* It rained continuously. Everywhere the harvest
A blackened in the fields, and farmers were faced with ruin,
landlords with depleted rentals. In England and Wales alone
three million sheep died of rot. Meanwhile industry struggled
against one of those periodic slumps which seemed inseparable
from the capitalist system. It was a universal tale of woe : of
cataclysmic falls in prices and streets full of unemployed. The
fog which lay over London that winter— yellow, choking and
foreboding— seemed to symbolise something out of joint in the
times. The pursuit of wealth for its own sake was resulting in .
what? For a moment the British vision seemed to have grown
too narrow: the basis of a community which lived on an
uncertain and uncontrollable export trade too small.

Yet for industry the trade depression of the early 'eighties
was only a passing phase: a pause in the progress of expansion.
It was followed in due course by recovery and renewed prosperity.
Demand for industrial products was still expanding faster than
supply: rich veins of unexploited markets remained to be
developed by the capitalist But for English agriculture the
blackened crops of 1879 and the years of continued rain and cold
that followed marked the end of an era. It never recovered.

It had enjoyed a glorious evening. The three decades between
the repeal of the Corn Laws and the fall of Disraeli's last
administration were the golden age of fanning. The bumper
harvests of the 'fifties and 'sixties had been accompanied by ex-
panding home markets, plentiful capital and cheap transport and
labour. The landed estates of Britain, employing more than a
million skilled workers and supporting the richest aristocracy

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