Imperialism, A Study

garnering the empirical wisdom of great agricultural races whose whole practical genius has been centred for countless ages on minute cultivation, like the Chinese, and when to such improved knowledge of agricultural arts is added a perfection of co-operative labour for those processes where this yields a true economy, the possibilities of intensive cultivation are virtually unlimited. These new conditions of a national policy of agriculture are themselves so important as to make it easily conceivable that a nation keenly set upon utilising them might for a long time to come reverse the operation of “the law of diminishing returns,” extracting from its own proper lands an increasing stock of food to meet its “natural” growth of population without a more than proportionate increase of labour engaged in agriculture. In face of recent experiments in intensive and scientific agriculture and the practical substitution of skilled gardening for unskilled farming, it is impossible to deny that such a triumph of the laws of mind over the laws of matter is probable in the most highly intelligent peoples. There are already manifested throughout Great Britain certain signs of such a set towards agriculture as took place in England during the middle of the eighteenth century, and led then to relatively great improvements in crop growing and stock breeding. If a brief fashion and sportive interest on the part of a small well-to-do class could then produce what is not wrongly described as an “agricultural revolution,” what might not be achieved now by vastly greater numbers, capital, and intelligence directed in a public policy and wielding the accumulated knowledge of modern science? Many causes consciously contribute towards such a brilliant revival of British agriculture. The growing sense of the hygienic and military perils which attend a nation of town dwellers, whose powers of forcible resistance are impaired in just proportion as their dependence upon precarious foreign supplies of food increases, is driving the issue of restoring a people to the land into the forefront of politics. Modern scientific transport, hitherto centripetal in its main economy, now seems to tend more to become centrifugal, while the wider spread of culture does something, and may do much, to cause