This subject has been largely expounded and discussed lately in the Times and other newspapers. As most of my readers are doubtless aware, it is simply a substitute for haymaking, by digging pits, paving and building them round with stone or concrete, then placing the green fodder therein and covering it over with sufficient earth to exclude the air.

We are told that very inferior material (such as coarse maize grass mixed with chaff) when thus preserved gives better feeding and milking results than good English hay.

I may mention a very humble experience of my own that bears upon this. When a boy, I was devoted to silkworms, and my very small supply of pocket-money was over-taxed in the purchase of exorbitantly small pennyworths of mulberry leaves at Covent Garden. But a friend in the country had a mulberry tree, and at rather long intervals I obtained large supplies, which, in spite of all my careful wrapping in damp cloths, became rotted in about ten days. I finally tried digging a hole and burying them. They remained fresh and green until all my silkworms commenced the working and fasting stage of their existence. This was ensilage on a small scale.

The correspondence in the newspapers has suggested a number of reasons why English farmers do not follow the example of their continental neighbors in this respect; climate, difference of grasses, etc., etc., are named, but the real reason why this is commercially impossible, and farming, properly so called, is becoming a lost art in England (mere meadow or prairie grazing gradually superseding it) is not named in any part of the discussion that I have read.

I refer to the cause which is abolishing the English dairy, which drives us to the commercial absurdity of importing fragile eggs from France, Italy, Spain, etc., apples from the other side of the Atlantic, tame house-fed rabbits from Belgium, and so on, with all other agricultural products which are precisely those we are naturally best able to produce at home; I mean those demanding a small area of land and a proportionately large amount of capital and labor. A poultry or rabbit farm, acre for acre, demands fully ten times the capital, ten times the labor, and yields ten times the produce obtained by our big-field beef and mutton graziers.

The scientific and economic merits of ensilage are probably all that is claimed for it, and it is especially adapted for our uncertain haymaking climate, but what farmer who is merely a lodger on the land, holding it as an annual tenant-at-will or under a stinted beggarly lease of 21 years, would expend his capital in building a costly silo, which becomes by our feudal laws and usages the absolute property of the landlord? Our tenant farmers employ the latest and best achievements of engineering science in the form of implements, but take care that they shall be upon wheels, or otherwise non-fixtures, and use rich chemically prepared manures, provided they are not permanent, while they abstain from improvements which involve any serious outlay in the form of fixtures on the land. Those who lecture them about their want of enterprise should always remember that their condition is merely a form of feudal serfdom, tempered by the possession of capital, and that all their agricultural operations are influenced by a continual struggle to prevent their capital from falling into the hands of the feudal lord. Anybody who has ever read an ordinary form of English farm-lease, with its prohibitions concerning the sale of hay and straw, and restrictions to “four-course,” or other mode of cultivation, must see the hopelessness of any development of British agriculture comparable to that of British commerce and manufactures.

Imagine the condition of a London shopkeeper or Midland manufacturer holding his business premises as a yearly tenant, liable at six months’ notice to quit, with confiscation of all his business fixtures.