The present state of agriculture in Eastern England is made manifest in deserted farms, in broken gates left hanging precariously on one hinge, in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted ploughs and decrepit waggons standing derelict in the once fertile fields, now overrun with foul weeds and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles; and farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely to remain tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible to grow seeds and flowers, and market-gardening is profitable only in the lands more immediately surrounding the great towns. With wheat at its present price of thirty shillings a quarter, it does not pay to grow corn for the market, and the land is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still struggles on, he lays down most of his holding in grass for sheep and cattle, and grows, grudgingly, as little wheat as possible, for sake of the straw. Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat was down to twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers fed their pigs on the harvest which cost them three pounds more per acre to grow than it would have brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it yields no profit. Agricultural England is, in short, ruined, and there seems no present hope of things becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States, Russia and other wheat-producing countries can be cultivated, reaped, and carried to these shores at the prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as advantageously, the English farmer must needs go without a living wage. As matters stand at present, we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat used in the country; the acreage under corn having gone down from 4,058,731 acres in 1852, to about half that at the present day. Meanwhile the population has increased by thirteen millions; so that, with many more mouths to fill, we grow only half the staple food these islands produced then. There are, of course, those who reap the advantage of cheap corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling millions of the towns and cities thrive on those benefits; but what if, through war, or from any other cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what avail would have been this generation of cheapness if at last the nation must starve? Extinguish agriculture and the farmer, and you cannot recall them at need, nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a land which has long gone untilled.