Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/69

Rh difficulties to encounter in any shape or form. For our farmers have at their doors an insatiable and boundless market, ever ready to absorb the best produce obtainable. Such are the palpable advantages of this occupation; and there are several others not much less considerable.

If our soil and climate are inferior in many respects, we enjoy, nevertheless, one unique excellence. Our stock is everywhere recognised as of the most serviceable and most valued strain. For instance, following on the heels of the fine-woolled Spanish merino, the English long-woolled sheep of the Leicester and Lincoln breeds have built up the most important flocks of the earth.

Nor do these factors by any means exhaust the catalogue of our agricultural advantages. Just as the Lancashire mill can do wonders with cotton, so the English farmer grows the best crops which the soil, such as it is, and his science, such as it is, can supply. As the operatives of Burnley and Oldham are unsurpassed in efficiency, so, in the Far West of Canada and in distant Tasmania alike, I have heard it acknowledged that the English agricultural labourer is the most vigorous, the most useful, and the most trustworthy of men.

Here again, as with cotton, it might be thought that we possess an industry of rare economic strength, able to supply wealth, at any rate in a modest degree, to the rural community. Yet the history of our agriculture during the last