Page:Orley Farm (Serial Volume 1).pdf/41

 chemists, she certainly did have her fears. Chemical agriculture is expensive; and though the results may possibly be remunerative, still, while we are thus kept waiting by the backwardness of the chemists, there must be much risk in making any serious expenditure with such views. 'Mother,' he said, when he had now been at home about three months, and when the fiat for the expulsion of Samuel Dockwrath had already gone forth, I shall go to Liverpool to-morrow.'

'To Liverpool, Lucius?'

'Yes. That guano which I got from Walker is adulterated. I have analyzed it, and find that it does not contain above thirty-two and a half hundredths of of that which it ought to hold in a proportion of seventy-five per cent of the whole.'

'Does it not?'

'No; and it is impossible to obtain results while one is working with such fictitious materials. Look at that bit of grass at the bottom of Greenwood's Hill.'

'The fifteen-acre field? Why, Lucius, we always had the heaviest crops of hay in the parish off that meadow.'

'That's all very well, mother; but you have never tried, nobody about here ever has tried, what the land can really produce. I will throw that and the three fields beyond it into one; I will get Greenwood to let me have that bit of the hill-side, giving him compensation of course'

'And then Dockwrath would want compensation.'

'Dockwrath is an impertinent rascal, and I shall take an opportunity of telling him so. But as I was saying, I will throw those seventy acres together, and then I will try what will be the relative effects of guano and the patent blood. But I must have real guano, and so I shall go to Liverpool.'

'I think I would wait a little, Lucius. It is almost too late for any change of that kind this year.'

'Wait! Yes, and what has come of waiting? We don't wait at all in doubling our population every thirty-three years; but when we come to the feeding of them we are always for waiting. It is that waiting which has reduced the intellectual development of one half of the human race to its present terribly low state—or rather prevented its rising in a degree proportionate to the increase of the population. No more waiting for me, mother, if I can help it.'

'But, Lucius, should not such new attempts as that be made by men with large capital?' said the mother.

'Capital is a bugbear,' said the son, speaking on this matter quite ex cathedrâ, as no doubt he was entitled to do by his extensive reading at a German university—'capital is a bugbear. The capital that is really wanting is thought, mind, combination, knowledge.'

'But, Lucius—'