Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/394

390 ordinary rotation of rye, oats, potatoes and clover. When the heathland is divided among small tenants in an unreclaimed state, cropping often begins without the lupins, the necessary nitrogen being imported by nitrate of soda, but for years the land shows inferior results. Only the tenant can rarely afford to lose the year the lupin crop involves, and so great is the demand for land in Germany that the State finds it preferable to let the tenant reclaim than to reclaim for him, and charge him as rent the cost of the more thorough process. And now as to the finance of the operation: the reclaiming down to the ploughing in of the lupin crop costs from £5 to £6 an acre, the bare heath costs from £5 to £7 an acre, the reclaimed land after a few years' cultivation would sell at £20 to £30 an acre. Meantime the State has probably made a free grant for drainage, looking to get some interest back in increased taxation; the local authority has also made roads for which the increased rating due to a new agricultural community must be the only return. It is a long-sighted policy which will only find its full justification after many years when the loans have all been paid off and the State has gained a well-established addition to its agricultural land and its productive population. In comparing English with German conditions there are certain differences to be taken into account—in the first place the work of reclamation will be dearer in England because of the higher price of labor, then the land will not be so valuable when won because the higher scale of prices for agricultural products enhances the price of land in Germany. Next, I doubt, in view of the great industrial demand for men in England, if we have the men available who will bring to the land the skill and power of drudgery that I saw being put into these German holdings of thirty to forty acres in their earlier years of low productivity. Moreover, in Germany these heaths are generally bordered by forests, in which the small holder gets occupation for part of the year while his wife and children keep the farm going. For this, if for no other reason, afforestation and land reclamation and settlement should go on together. But, despite these drawbacks, I am still of opinion that the reclamation of such heath-lands is a sound commercial venture in England, either for a landowner who is thinking of a future rather than of a present return on his capital, or for the state or other public body, wherever the waste land can be acquired for less than £5 an acre. The capitalized value of its present rental rarely approaches that figure, but the barrenest heath is apt to develop the potentialities of a gold-mine when purchase by the state comes in question. The map of England is so written over in detail with boundaries and rights and prescriptions that the path of the would-be reclaimer, who must work on a large scale if he is to work cheaply, can only be slow and devious. There are other possibilities of winning agricultural land even in England, from the slob land and estuaries, from the clays