If it can be shown that, instead of increasing our importation of foreign food and wool year after year, we might grow sufficient for our needs-if we could keep in the country the immense sum, amounting to nearly 124,000,000l., sent out of it in exchange for these commodities in 1878-it should not be difficult to convince every Englishman that his interest in agricultural reform is of such vast importance that he cannot afford any longer to neglect it. For it is obvious that it is only by agricultural reform, in the widest sense of the term, that such an increase of home production can be brought about. But is it possible? Such an increase would be only half that which such high authorities as the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Derby have declared to be, in their opinion, possible; while Mr. Mechi, I believe, goes beyond those noblemen in his estimate of what the United Kingdom would produce if it were one vast Tiptree Hall farm. Those who are opposed to reform laugh at such estimates as these, but it would be easy to point out a few exceptionally well cultivated and stocked farms which produce twice as much as neighbouring farms with equal natural advantages. No one, however, supposes that our farm produce could be doubled in a few years' time. If it is feasible, as I believe it is, a lengthened period of steady improvement would be required to bring it to pass. But the possibility put before the British consumer just now is not the doubling of our agricultural production, but its increase by fifty per cent. The total quantity of land returned for the United Kingdom in 1878 as under all kinds of crops, bare, fallow, and grass, exclusive of heath and mountain pasture-land, and of woods and plantations, was 47,327,000 acres. Dividing Mr. Caird's estimated home produce of 260,737,500l. by this number, we find the value per acre, without reckoning an odd 2d., to be 5l. 108. His estimate, which includes hay for horses and straw sold off the land, does not include the value of hops, vegetables, and fruit produced in market-gardens larger than a quarter of an acre, or poultry and eggs. But the value of these excluded commodities probably does not exceed that of the foreign food which goes to produce a portion of the meat included in his table. As to seeds of various kinds, as we import more than we export, they are rightly excluded from the estimate. We may, therefore, take 5l. 108. per acre as a fair estimate of our produce. Will it then be maintained that fifty per cent. increase upon this amount, or 8l. 58. per acre, is an impossible produce? On the contrary, we know that it is exceeded year after year on large numbers of farms naturally poor, but well cultivated and stocked. No great length of time would be needed to realise such an increased production. All that is wanted is an adequate supply of capital, used with ordinary skill and enterprise. The skill and enterprise are not lacking, though to put them in action the removal of the absurd restrictions in farm leases and agreements which tie the hands of our farmers is absolutely necessary.

The capital, too, would be forthcoming in abundance if it were made reasonably secure by the reform of the laws which affect the tenancy of land. It is objected that as farming has not paid in recent years, it is absurd to expect more capital to be invested in a losing business. In reply to this, I confidently assert that those farmers who have the largest amount of capital judiciously invested in the land are suffering the least at the present time of serious depression, except where they have been unfairly over-rented as the result of their liberal expenditure, as has too often been the case. Besides, it is unreasonable to base an opinion as to future possibilities upon the result of farming in a series of exceptionally bad years. Nothing but a general reduction of rents will meet the present crisis; and in the face of the increasing competition of foreign producers, it would be rash to predict that the value of land for farming can be restored to its recent high rate, except as the result of a liberal expenditure of landlords' capital. Rents, however, are rapidly being adjusted, by the natural incidence of supply and demand, to the altered conditions of farming, and when the adjustment has completed itself, tenants will only need security for their capital and freedom for their enterprise to give them a fair field in their struggle against foreign competitors. With such a fair field there would practically be no question as to whether land should be well or ill farmed; there would be simply a choice between farming well and giving up arable cultivation, at least on all but the most fertile descriptions of land. It is quite certain that, with their heavy expenses, British farmers can only compete with the cultivators of cheap and fertile land in the United States and our colonies by producing greater returns. Do what they may in the way of cutting down expenses, it is impossible for them to economise sufficiently to make a return of 5l. 10s. per acre profitable. On the other hand, an average return for the United Kingdom of 81. 58. per acre would, I firmly believe, give a fair living for the farmers.

Pessimists, who declare that British and Irish agriculture must inevitably decline, and Protectionists, who aver that nothing but duties on foreign food can save it, forget that liberal farming has never yet had a fair chance in this country. In Scotland, where, under the partial security of long leases, the highest farming has generally prevailed, the fruits of the tenant's capital and enterprise have been for the most part appropriated by their landlords in the form of enhanced rent. The only way of escape from this spoliation has been by undoing in the latter years of the lease all that had been done to render the land more productive at the commencement. In England, speaking generally, the chief difference has been that tenants have been less tempted to liberal expenditure, and have for the most part farmed as Scotch tenants farm at the fag-end of their leases. Of course, the exceptions have

been numerous, though few in proportion to the whole number of tenancies. They have chiefly prevailed in counties or parts of counties where more or less liberal covenants are customary, or on estates where what may be termed a bastard security pertains-that is, a security depending upon personal goodwill, which is at the best but an uncertain safeguard. Rents have also been artificially raised by the operation of the Laws of Hypothec and Distress, while over large tracts of the country swarms of game have destroyed the fruits of agricultural industry. While capital has thus been rendered unsafe and unremunerative, enterprise has been checked by restrictions upon cropping and the sale of produce. In short, if a prescription for keeping farming at a low ebb had been deliberately drawn up, it could not well have been more effectual for its purpose than the prevailing conditions of farm tenancy in this kingdom have been. When tenants have rashly defied these adverse conditions, their success or failure has usually been a matter of pure chance. If luck has been in their favour-if, for instance, they have lived long enough, and their generous landlords have lived long enough, or been succeeded by liberal heirs—they have generally reaped a reward far in excess of that obtained by their more cautious neighbours; if the reverse, ruin has been their portion. I do not know whether the majority of those who have thus tempted fortune have succeeded or failed; but if the greater number have been unfortunate, I emphatically affirm that the result is to be attributed, not to their high farming, but to the unfair conditions under which it has been carried Alter the conditions, and it is most unfair and unreasonable to assume that what has hitherto been unremunerative will be so for the future. A great preponderance of the evidence which bears upon the question points, I am certain, to the opposite verdict.

on.

But if tenants have been hitherto prevented in almost every imaginable way from doing their best with the land, landlords have been, if possible, still more imperatively deterred from doing their duty. The effects of entail, primogeniture, limited ownership, settlements, and difficult and costly transfer, have been to tie up large estates in the hands of embarrassed owners, and further to render it disadvantageous even to most of those who have had the means to improve their property to do so. The result has been injurious to landlords, tenants, and consumers alike; for, although landlords' improvements are naturally and rightly followed by increased rents, their profit, when they are judiciously carried out, is in excess of their cost to both parties, while to the consumer the benefit is unquestionable.

Place landlords and tenants under the most favourable conditions for developing the resources of the land, which a thorough reform of our land and land-tenancy laws would afford, and in ten years-I would ask for no longer period-our fifty per cent. of increased produce will be realised.

The effects of such a consummation as is above declared to be possible would by no means be limited to the simple benefit of an increased supply of home produce, great as that would be. The use in the country of the large amount of capital now sent out of it for foreign food would have results which are simply incalculable and barely imaginable. Most obvious is the advantage that would accrue to farm labourers, country tradesmen, and town shopkeepers, and the increased prosperity of these members of the community would react upon the people at large. The whole commerce of the kingdom would share in the benefit, and even the decline of exports, if it should continue, would then be a matter of comparative indifference. The workmen of our towns would no longer have their bread taken out of their mouths by a constant and excessive influx of starved-out country labourers who underbid them in the wage market. A migration there still might be, but it would be more moderate in extent and more regular in its incidence than it is under a recurrence of seasons of periodical panic. But it is needless to enlarge upon the advantages that would result from the supposed development of our agricultural resources, since no one who admits that development to be possible will question the vastness of its benefits. If I have not used the facts with which I have dealt very ineffectively, I have written enough to convince the most shoppy of shopkeepers of the transcendent importance of the public interest in agricultural reform. The serious condition of our agricultural industry is now more fully recognised than it has been at any time within the last forty years, because that industry is passing through a crisis of almost unprecedented severity. Few who have given their attention to the subject deny that something must be done if we are not to resign ourselves in despair to a permanent agricultural decline. But the efficacy of the remedies at which I have merely hinted in the preceding remarks is stoutly denied by many and regarded with scepticism by more people still. It remains, therefore, to point out more definitely the directions which agricultural reform should take, and to give reasons for confidence in the result of each proposed alteration of existing conditions. This task I must reserve for a future article.

WILLIAM E. BEAR.

DISCOVERY OF ODINIC SONGS IN

SHETLAND.

I.

AN essay of mine on Yggdrasil, or the Teutonic Tree of Existence, had just been published, when from far-off Shetland I received a most striking bit of folk-lore, containing a strange relic of the grand old myth. It is a fragment, in poetical garb, showing both the staff-rime and the ordinary rime. The text comes remarkably close to the first verse in Odin's Rune Song,' which I had quoted in connection with the Germanic idea of the World-Tree, the symbol of the Universe and of all its varied and wondrous manifestations of life.

I believe the discovery of this waif-somewhat distorted as it is— of an Eddic creation-lay on the lips of a living person to be unique in its kind. The discovery was made in Unst, the northernmost part of the cluster of Shetland isles where the Norse race once ruled for a long time and made a deep imprint by its blood, its speech, and its laws. To this day the Shetlanders, lying midway between Norway and Scotland, look upon themselves as a people quite apart. Historically, it may be remembered, they were given in pledge by Denmark to the Scottish Crown. In character and tradition a good deal of their Scandinavian origin still clings to them. Their stormtossed country is as a stepping-stone to that land of snow and fire. which gave us the Edda and the Heims-Kringla. And even as, in distant Iceland, the old saga spirit is fully alive, so there are yet tales and bits of rimes current among the common Shetland folk, in which, with fuller research, strange echoes from the Germanic world of Gods may be recognised.

Only those who have worked with loving steadfastness for the clearing up of moot points in our forefathers' weird and charmful creed, can perhaps feel the full delight of a discovery like the one made in Unst. With a Folk-lore Society being at last founded in England we may hope that similar cases of unearthing treasures of ancient tradition will oftener occur. It is not to be expected that they will be as frequent as they have been in Germany, where the brothers Grimm gave a great start to work of this kind. Yet, now and then, an