Hitherto, reasoning backward from effect to cause, it would seem that farming has been remunerative only when undertaken on a large scale; but those who can read the signs of the times tell us that the age, just dawning to the country-side, will be the age of the small man. And this must mean that the hereditary aristocracy among crops—wheat, oats, barley—will slowly give place to little-culture: in a word, that the land will be made to produce, not the things that tradition and our yeoman family pride have ordained as the be-all and end-all of farming, but the minor, humble necessities for which each town and village should look to the good brown earth immediately about it, but at present looks in vain. Farmers’ ladies may then no longer sit in their drawing-rooms and ride in their carriages, but that will be a change for the simpler, more proportionate. Those who live in towns have little conception of it; but the country-dweller knows well what complexity and luxury have got into the old English farmhouses, for all the outcry about hard times; how the farmer’s wife no longer goes to her dairy, nor makes any of the good old farmhouse things that served to uphold country England in days gone by; and how the master-agriculturists now are the sinews of the great London Stores, while the little local shopkeepers are left to the field-labourer with his twelve or fifteen shillings a week.
For the class of small-holders that must now multiply throughout the length and breadth of the land, there is awaiting an enterprise—a source of livelihood—as yet hardly tapped. A stock subject of envy with most artisans is the capitalist who leads an easy life while his factory hands toil for him. But if the small-holder will take up bee-keeping, he too can look on, to a large extent, while his thousands of winged labourers are filling his storehouse with some of the most useful and saleable merchandise in the world. It is a truism in commerce that a good supply creates a demand just as certainly as that the universal want of a thing stimulates its production. One of the needs in England to-day is a full, good, and cheap supply of honey; and when this is forthcoming there will be little fear but that the present demand will increase hand over hand.