they will be sadly disappointed. They must
have, besides, tenants with enterprise and
capital ; and they must establish easy
intercourse between the country and the city,
to imitate Britain, north and south.

Passing the pigs without comment, we are
brought to the implements, which covered
acres of the Champs Elysées — four or five
times as much space, in fact, as they covered
at Chelmsford ; but the Chelmsford exhibition
was a vast bazaar, or fair for business ;
and there the prizes were scarcely a
consideration. At the Champs Elysées, half
the things shown were toys, tricks, or weak
expedients to make wood and sheet-iron
do the work of iron bars and solid bolts.
In the olden time of Ireland it was not
uncommon to meet a pony driven to Cork
with a firkin of butter on one side, balanced
by a big stone on the other. That is the
foreign system of encouraging agriculture:
every improver is obliged to carry one or
more big stones, in the shape oi duties,
regulations and monopolies.

Chelmsford was the nineteenth meeting of
the Royal Agricultural Society ; and there
was certainly not more than one new agricultural
implement. During the whole
nineteen years it is doubtful if more than
nine useful new inventions in agricultural
implements have been produced. But, during
that period, the improvement in all agricultural
implements has been enormous — in
many instances equal to new inventions.

These improvements have invariably
turned on the substitution of iron for wood.
They have been introduced step by step
with the extension of iron railroads, which
have given new markets to Devonshire,
Wales, Scotland, and all the counties where
want of a market made agricultural produce
cheap. These iron railroads have carried
coal, too, for the blacksmith who mends
the iron plough, and for the farmer who
sends for and sets a steam-engine agoing.
They have made local agricultural shows
possible, and have carried John Bull, who
never stirred from home before, to London
Smithfield Club, or to Lincoln, or Gloucester.
They have carried him back a cargo of guano
and a threshing-machine, with a bag full of
new ideas. The result of nineteen years of
railroads, exhibitions, comparisons, competitions,
rubbings together of landlord and
tenant, and free trade at home and abroad,
was seen at Chelmsford ; where the yard was
full of farmers buying from the same
manufacturers who, twenty years ago, were satisfied
to produce curious ingenious agricultural toys
for rich landlords.

In Frauce, where the industry of the little
peasant farmers is above all praise ; where
landed proprietors, driven from towns by
politics, are most anxious to improve ; where
the government buys the best English animals
at fabulous prices, and specimens of all the
best implements ; — where there is a minister
of agriculture with a host of subordinate
Barnacles ; where there are model farms with
fifteen professors, each in the principal
departments (not more useless than model
establishments in other countries) ; where
government prizes are annually distributed
in each department among implement-
makers, whose respective merits are a puzzle
to an Englishman with a prejudice in favour
of simplicity and durability in machinery ;
it would seem that the prizes are given,
not for improving but for deteriorating implements,
for substituting wood for iron, and
obtaining cheapness at the expense of
workmanship. The use of iron in agricultural
implements can not be considered worth
encouraging in France, while the taxes on English
iron-made implements amount, from first
to last, to about forty per cent. ; the
nominal duty is twenty ; extras making the
rest. Count Conrad de Gourcey, in his
Voyage Agricole, tells us that the Crosskill's
clod-crusher is one of the most valuable
implements for French cultivation ; being
nearly all of iron, it is taxed nearly sixty
per cent. But these taxes are on the
manufactured article made in England ; there is
also a handsome tax on bar iron, which
effectually prevents the French blacksmith
from indulging in any luxury of iron, or in
those experiments which have made great
manufacturers of small blacksmiths in
England. To add to the tax on iron, there is a tax
on coal ; so that, supposing a French farmer
able to start a steam engine, he is punished in
a tax every time he lights a fire ; and, to keep
iron in countenance, there is a tax on wood.
A writer in the Révue des Deux Mondes
exclaims with pardonable vanity : "The
French agricultural steam engines are as good
as the English, only the English makers sell
a hundred where the French sell one." The
truth is, that whether in doors, windows, or
steam engines, the French fail to make a good
fit, so of course the French engines do not
last long ; but, the writer forgets that large
sales make good workmanship in mechanical
work. The state-logic on this subject is
curiously bad : — The French farmer is not so rich
as the English farmer, therefore he is kept poor
by being taxed. He cannot afford a plough
team, therefore he must pay twice as much as
an Englishman for a steel digging fork.
At Chelmsford there was a great sale for a
broad-cast artificial manure distributor,
invented by a Norfolk farmer. How could
French farmers venture on such purchases ?
Guano, nitrate of soda, and other valuable
manures are foreign productions, and subject
by French law to a duty of twenty francs a
ton, if they arrive, (as they almost always do),
in a foreign ship.

In a word, the French farmer cannot move
to mend his ways without a tax, and has not
even the privilege of grumbling in print or
by petition. But, that is not all. Suppose his
ox or cow fit for the butcher, the veterinary