In a Society which disposed of 10,000_l._ a year of public money, granted by Parliament chiefly with a view, as the Act expresses, to encourage agriculture, but which patronised manufacturers far more, there will necessarily be an agricultural party and a manufacturing one. According as one or the other happens to prevail, such contradictions will arise. All that is to be said of my case now is, that it was not so bad as that of poor Whyman Baker, who settled in Ireland as their experimenter in agriculture—lived there in poverty ten or twelve years—and broke his heart on account of the treatment which he met with. But while their Societies acted thus, the Parliament of the kingdom paid my book a much greater compliment than any Society could do; for they passed more than one Act almost directly, to alter and vary the police of corn, which I had proved was vicious, but which till then had been universally esteemed as the chief pillar of their national prosperity, and I had thus the satisfaction to see the Legislature of the kingdom improving the policy of it from the known and confessed suggestions of a work that, in other respects, had proved to the author a mere barren blank. I have, however, since heard from many most respectable gentlemen of that nation, as well as from the correspondence of others, that the book is even now esteemed of some value to Ireland, and that the agriculture of the kingdom has been advanced in consequence. But it is time to dismiss a subject upon which I have dilated too much, and spoken perhaps with an unguarded vanity and self-love which would ill become me. I was the chief part of this year at Bradfield, but I had bought at London a pair of roan mares for drawing a post-chaise, and having the small farm in hand, I made myself by practice no bad ploughman, and could finish the stetches[66] neatly, and execute everything except the rivalling the Suffolk ploughman in drawing straight furrows to a mark set for that purpose; yet I overcame this difficulty in a manner that would have been commended in any other county. The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce voted me their Honorary Medal for some experiments I had communicated to them on the culture of potatoes.