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 In the year 1904–1905 £10,600 was devoted by the Board of Agriculture to agricultural instruction and experiments. Of this sum the greater part was divided amongst the institutions marked with an asterisk in the above list. The first three named are private establishments. The county councils also expend sums varying at their own discretion on instruction in dairy-work, poultry-keeping, farriery and veterinary science, horticulture, agricultural experiments, agricultural lectures at various centres, scholarships at, and grants to, agricultural colleges and schools; the whole amount in 1904–1905 reaching £87,472. The sum spent by individual counties varies considerably. In 1904–1905 Lancashire (£8510), Kent (£5922) and Cheshire (£4510) spent most in this “direction. In some instances colleges are supported entirely by one county, as is the Holmes Chapel College, Cheshire; in others a college is supported by several affiliated counties, as in the case of the agricultural department of the University College, Reading, which acts in connexion with the counties of Berks, Oxon, Hants and Buckingham. The organization and supply of county agricultural instruction is often carried out through the medium of the institution to which the county is affiliated. In Scotland higher agricultural instruction is given at:— A typical course at one of the higher colleges lasts for two years and includes instruction under the heads of soils and manure, crops and pasture, live stock, foods and feeding, dairy work, farm and estate management and farm bookkeeping, surveying, agricultural buildings and machinery, agricultural chemistry, agricultural botany, veterinary science and agricultural entomology. Experimental farms are attached to the colleges. The facilities for intermediate are far inferior to those for higher agricultural education. Schools for farmers’ sons and daughters, and others, answering to the écoles pratiques d’agriculture (see ), are few, the principal being the Dauntsey Agricultural School, Wiltshire, the Hampshire Farm School, Basing, and the Farm School at Newton Rigg, Penrith, Cumberland, maintained by the county councils of Cumberland and Westmorland. Occasionally grammar schools have agricultural sides, and in evening continuation schools agricultural classes are sometimes held. Both elementary day schools and continuation schools are in many cases provided with gardens in which horticultural teaching is given.

In Ireland agricultural education is under the supervision of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland, founded in 1899. Higher education is given at the Royal College of Science, Dublin; the Albert Agricultural College, Glasnevin; and the Munster Institute, Cork, for female students, where dairying and poultry-keeping are prominent subjects. Winter classes for boys over sixteen years of age are held at centres in some counties, and there are winter schools of agriculture at Downpatrick, Monaghan and Mount Bellew (Co. Galway); while lectures are given at farmers’ meetings by itinerant instructors. The Department carries on agricultural experiment-stations at Athenry (Co. Galway), Ballyhaise (Co. Cavan) and Clonakilty (Co. Cork), where farm apprentices are received and instructed.  

Agriculture has been the chief and most characteristic work of the American people, that in which they have achieved the greatest results in proportion to the resources at command, that in which their economic superiority has been most strikingly manifest. In ten years from 1790, the mean population of the period being 4,500,000, 65,000 sq. m. were for the first time brought within the limits of settlement, crossed with roads and bridges, covered with dwellings, both public and private, much of it also cleared of primeval forest; and this in addition to keeping up and improving the whole extent of previous settlements, and building towns and cities, at a score of favoured points. In the next decade, the mean number of inhabitants being about 6,500,000, population extended itself over 98,000 sq. m. of absolutely new territory, an area eight times as large as Holland. Between 1810 and 1820, besides increasing the density of population on almost every league of the older territory, besides increasing their manufacturing capital twofold, in spite of a three years’ war, the people of the United States advanced their frontier to occupy 101,000 sq. m., the mean population being 8,250,000. Between 1820 and 1830, 124,000 sq. m. were brought within the frontier and made the seat of habitation and cultivation; between 1830 and 1840, 175,000 sq. m.; between 1840 and 1850, 215,000 sq. m. The Civil War, indeed, checked the westward flow of population, though it caused no refluence, but after 1870 great progress was made in the creation of new farms and the development of old.

That which has allowed this great work to be done so rapidly and fortunately has been, first, the popular tenure of the soil, and, secondly, the character of the agricultural class. At no time have the cultivators of the soil north of the Potomac and Ohio constituted a peasantry in the ordinary sense of that term. They have been the same kind of men, out of precisely the same homes, generally with the same early training, as those who filled the learned professions or who were engaged in manufacturing or commercial pursuits. Switzerland and Scotland have, in a degree, approached the United States in this particular; but there is no other considerable country where as much mental activity and alertness has been applied to the cultivation of the soil as to trade and manufactures.

But even the causes which have been adduced would have failed to produce such effects but for the exceptional inventive ingenuity of the American. The mechanical genius which has entered into manufacturing in the United States, the engineering skill which has guided the construction of the greatest works of the continent, have been far exceeded in the hurried “improvements” of the pioneer farm; in the housing of women, children and live stock and gathered crops against the storms of the first few winters; in the rough-and-ready reconnaissances which determined the “lay of the land” and the capabilities of the soil; in the preparation for the thousand exigencies of primitive agriculture. It is no exaggeration to say that the chief manufacture of the United States, prior to 1900, was the manufacture of 5,740,000 farms, comprising 841,200,000 acres. The people of the United States, finding themselves on a continent containing an almost limitless extent of land of fair average fertility, having at the start but little accumulated capital and urgent occasions for the economy of labour, have elected to regard the land in the earliest stages of occupation as practically of no value, and to regard labour as of high value. In pursuance of this view they have freely sacrificed the land, so far as was necessary, in order to save labour, systematically cropping the fields on the principle of obtaining the largest results with the least expenditure, limiting improvements to what was demanded for immediate uses, and caring little about returning to the soil an equivalent for the properties taken from it in the harvests of successive years. But, so far as the northern 