ARTHUR YOUNG: AUTHOR OF THE AGRICULTURAL TOUR
_"The magic of property turns sands into gold. Give a man the
secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a
garden; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will
convert it into a desert."_--Arthur Young.
Arthur Young, the greatest of English agriculturists and the poorest
of practical farmers, was born at Whitehall, London, in the year 1741.
He was the youngest son of the Reverend Dr. Arthur Young, Prebendary
of Canterbury Cathedral, Rector of Bradfield, and of Anne Lucretia,
daughter of John de Cousmaker, a Dutchman who accompanied William of
Orange to England. From his father Arthur inherited good looks and
literary talent; and from his mother the love of learning and
brilliant and pleasing speech.
Mrs. Young brought her clerical husband a large dowry, much of which
was swallowed up in the vortex of his debts, and later, on his death,
in promoting the agricultural schemes of her gifted but unbusinesslike
son. His home from the first, and for the most part of his life, was
Bradfield Hall in the County of Suffolk--a property which had been in
the hands of the Young family since the year 1672. After a visit to
Bradfield, reached from Marks Tey on the Great Eastern Railway, you do
not wonder at Young's early love of rural life. A broad, winding,
elm-bordered road, meadows knee-deep in wild flowers and waving
grasses, tangled hedges of eglantine and honeysuckle, rustling
cornfields and silent woods--these, all these, were the sweet pathways
to his home.
At the age of seven the lad was sent to the Grammar School at Lavenham
in order to learn the Greek and Latin languages, together with writing
and arithmetic. Owing to the indulgence of a fond mother, his
attendance at his classes was irregular, and neither the centurions of
Cæsar nor the wooers of Penelope were able to beguile him from his
pony, his pointer and his gun. But the cheapness of his board and
schooling would delight the hearts of many parents in the Transvaal
and elsewhere in the year of grace 1912. Here is the bill:--
"The Rev. Dr. Young to John Coulter (Master of Lavenham School),
Xmas, 1750 to Xmas, 1751. A year's board, etc., £15. Sundries, £2
4_s._ 4_d._ Total, £17 4_s._ 4_d._"
On leaving Lavenham, he was apprenticed, at the wish of his mother,
to a wine-merchant at Lynn. He deserted his new work. He was fond of
music and the drama. He excelled in dancing, but was always a diligent
scholar.
His income, in those days, was not excessive, being thirty pounds per
annum: but his foppery in dress deprived him of the means wherewith to
purchase his beloved books. Accordingly, he wrote a pamphlet entitled
"The Theatre of the Present War in North America," for which he
received ten pounds' worth of books from the publisher. More balls
compelled him to compile more political pamphlets in order to procure
more books. In the year 1759, at the age of eighteen, he left the
counting house at Lynn, as he tells us in his own words, "without
education, pursuits, profession or employment." That same year his
father died much in debt.
He next went to London and started at his own expense a monthly
magazine called "The Universal Museum." It failed, and he returned
home. All his wealth was now summed up in a freehold farm of twenty
acres. His mother owned eighty acres at Bradfield. She persuaded him
to reside with her and to manage the farm. He had no knowledge of
agriculture, but he accepted, and tells the story in his own words:
"Young, eager, and totally ignorant of every necessary detail, it is
not surprising that I squandered large sums under golden dreams of
improvement." At the age of twenty-four he married Miss Martha Allen
of Lynn. One of his biographers says: "The marriage brought him an
enviable connection--troops of friends, a passport into brilliant
circles, but no fireside happiness. The lady was evidently of a
captious disposition, shrewish temper and narrow sympathies." Another
biographer writes: "A loving son, a devoted father, Young was an
indifferent husband."
Having failed to make a success of his first farm, Young, nothing
daunted, undertook the cultivation of Sampford Hall in Essex. This
farm consisted of 300 acres of good arable land. But want of practical
knowledge, and want of capital, drove him from it, and after a five
years' tenancy he paid a farmer £100 to take it off his hands. His
successor made a fortune on it. But during these five years Young had
made a large number of experiments, the results of which he afterwards
published in two large volumes under the title of "A Course of
Experimental Agriculture." Still unshaken in his love of the soil, he
sought another farm, and the quest furnished materials for his "Six
Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties," a very popular work which
ran through several editions. It was at this time that on the advice
of his Suffolk bailiff he took a farm of one hundred acres at North
Mimms in Hertfordshire. This property had a good house, but that seems
to have been all. He was deceived by seeing it in a specially good
season. This speculation proved worse than the last; but his
picturesque pen never failed: "I know what epithet to give this soil.
Sterility falls short of the idea--a hungry, vitriolic gravel. I
occupied for nine years the jaws of a wolf." The simple fact was that
whenever he put pen to paper he was successful; whenever he turned to
practical farming he was a ruined man.
He continued to write. His publisher called for more tours. His
receipts were considerable, yet we find him recording: "No carthorse
ever laboured as I did at this period, spending like an idiot, always
in debt, in spite of what I earned with the sweat of my brow, and
almost my heart's blood--the year's receipts £1,167." About this time
he wrote "Observations on the Present State of the Waste Lands of
Great Britain," and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Finding
that he could not make enough to live on at farming, he accepted an
appointment as Parliamentary Reporter for the "Morning Post" at five
guineas a week--a most incongruous job for a farmer since it compelled
him to be absent from his home during six days of the week. Yet he
retained it for several years--walking seventeen miles down to his
farm every Saturday evening and returning to London every Monday
morning.
In the year 1784 Young began the publication of the "Annals of
Agriculture"--a monthly publication which ran through forty-five
volumes. These annals covered the whole field of Agriculture in the
form of letters and essays from the most eminent ruralists of the age.
But more than a fourth part of the whole series came from the editor's
ceaseless pen. Even the King was persuaded to contribute two letters
under the _nom de plume_ of "Ralph Robinson," his Windsor shepherd.
Young related with much pride that His Majesty said to him one day on
the terrace of Windsor: "Mr. Young, I consider myself as more obliged
to you than to any other man in my Dominions"; while the Queen
observed that they never travelled without a copy of the "Annals" in
the Royal carriage. These volumes created quite a stir in European
circles, and from all parts of the Continent there flocked scholars to
study at the feet of the Abelard of English Agriculture. A year later
Young's mother died and Bradfield Hall and farm became his property.
If Tull was the founder of dry-farming, and Coke the father of the
experimental farm, Young was unquestionably the author of the
agricultural tour. From his fertile pen flowed "The Southern," "The
Northern," and "The Eastern Tours," together with "The Tour in
Ireland." The first three tours were translated into Russian by the
express command of the Empress Catherine, who at the same time sent
several young Russians to reside at Bradfield for instruction in
British agriculture. It was his own opinion that the most useful
feature of the tours was the practical information which they gave on
the important subject of the correct courses of crops, on which all
preceding writers had been silent. His most famous and most popular
work was his "Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788 and
1789."
Yet these remarkable journeys were fore-shadowed twenty years before
in a little book he wrote entitled "The Farmer's Letters to the People
of England," in which he says: "The nobility and men of large fortune
travel, but no farmers; unfortunately, those who have this peculiar
and distinguishing advantage, the noble opportunity of benefiting
themselves and their country, seldom enquire or even think about
agriculture."
Then comes a sketch of a farmer's tour with the routes laid down for
the imaginary traveller, being precisely those roads he himself was to
follow two decades later.
In the year 1787 he received a pressing invitation from a Polish
friend in Paris to join the Count de la Rochefoucauld in a tour of the
Pyrenees. "This was touching a string tremulous to vibrate," he
writes: "I had long wished for an opportunity to examine France." His
travels in France were the sensation of the hour. No one had done
quite the same thing before. He was an eye-witness of the moving
scenes which ushered in the French Revolution. His name was in
everybody's mouth. He received invitations to Courts and salons.
All the learned societies enrolled him as a member. His work was
translated into a score of languages. Princes, statesmen, scientists,
men of letters, simple farmers and plain peasants paid a visit to
Bradfield. Among his correspondents we note the names of Washington,
Pitt. Burke, Wilberforce, Lafayette, Priestly and Jeremy Bentham. So
it happened that when the affluent Coke of Norfolk was holding a
Continental sheep-shearing salon at Holkham, his indigent neighbour,
fifty miles to the south, was holding a European levee to discuss the
fundamental principles of rural economy.
Four years later Young's heart was broken by the death of his
favourite daughter, "Bobbin" at the early age of fourteen. He
developed religious melancholia, shunned society, left his Journal
blank and brooded over sermons. His sight began to fail. He was
operated on for cataract. Wilberforce, warned to be careful, went, a
week later, to see him in the darkened room. In his sweet and elegant
voice the Great Emancipator spoke feelingly of the death of a mutual
friend. Young burst into tears and became for ever blind. The
remainder of his life was spent in preaching the Gospel to the
peasantry and in works of charity. He died in the eightieth year of
his age in Sackville Street, London, and was buried at Bradfield,
April, 1820.
It is impossible in this brief article to do more than mention the
writings of Young. These we must reserve for a subsequent paper. Our
library is far from complete, yet we possess sixty-six volumes of his
sparkling prose, which, placed one upon another, attain to a height of
nine feet--a monument of amazing industry. True, he was not exempt
from those petty jealousies which so often mar the character of
eminent men. He tried to snatch some credit for the Board of
Agriculture from Sir John Sinclair, and he scoffed at the idea that
Jethro Tull had invented the corn-drill. He met and conversed with the
greatest savants of the age, yet his mind never burst the old wine
bottles which he served out in the Suffolk store. And so he arrogantly
says that Canada and Nova Scotia are not worth colonising. "If they
continue poor, they will be no markets. If rich they will revolt; and
that perhaps is the best thing they can do for our interest." ...
"The loss of India must come. It ought to come." Yet with all his
foolish fancies what a splendid life! For he was the Prophet of the
New Agriculture in the Valley of Dry Bones. And England may well write
the epitaph of her illustrious son in the words of Ezekiel: "This land
that was desolate is become like the Garden of Eden."