Part 2

In 1847, Mr. John T. Osborne, of Demerara, took out a patent for a steam-plough, the chief improvement (or distinguishing peculiarity--we must be cautious in the use of the word improvement,) on all previous attempts, being the employment of two engines and two ploughs, for one course of ploughing. While one plough was working in a given direction, and laying down the chain or rope by which it is to be worked back to the side from which it started--the other plough was performing a similar course in the reverse direction. When both had each traversed the ground once, the engines were removed forward the breadth of one furrow, by means of a chain or rope; one end of which was attached to an anchor fixed in the ground a-head.

Another Mr. Osborn, in 1848, tried some experiments near Stratford, in Essex, with a locomotive steam-engine, constructed for agricultural works in general, and for ploughing more especially. He appears to have taken out his patent in conjunction with Mr. Andrew Smith’s wire-rope--a manufacture of extraordinary strength. In the first trial, a pair of these peculiarly constructed locomotives was placed opposite each other--about one hundred and twenty yards apart--with a sufficient length of wire-rope between them. Although not successful, it demonstrated a novel fact as between the comparative draught by horses, and by a long rope, showing that the condition of the modes differ in a very marked way; the horse draught being upwards, and exercising a direct control by its proximity to the plough; whereas, the draught by steam-power and a rope was downwards, distant, and exercised no direct control over the plough. Hence this experiment, though unsuccessful, was instructive, and therefore to be valued as a good contribution to knowledge. Other trials were subsequently made by Mr. Osborn with a locomotive engine of ten horse power, and the ploughing was well done; fully settling the question of practicability, but leaving doubts in the minds of many on the important question of economy.

“These engines,” says a writer in the Mechanics’ Magazine, “possess great advantages in being applicable to thrashing, and other agricultural purposes, and can be moved from farm to farm, and from field to field, with the greatest facility.” No doubt of it. We see what will soon happen. Thrashing, and _many other_ agricultural purposes! The great farmers, once in possession of the talisman of a steam-plough, will never rest till they make it applicable to all sorts of operations. Already almost every farmer in Scotland is provided with a stationary steam-engine; a locomotive that can turn--not its hands--but its wheels to anything, is now his only other thing needful. In the specification of the very first of these ploughs--Etzler’s Iron Slave--it is distinctly stated that, although the machine is intended for ploughing, yet the Slave will be ready at all times to devote his energies and skill to “sowing, and reaping; and also to making canals, roads, tunnels,” &c. Exactly so! After we have ploughed, sowed, reaped, and thrashed by steam, we shall soon find turnips hoed, carrots drawn, beans plucked up, dried, carted, and stacked; sheep sheared, cows milked, butter churned, cheese pressed, pigs transformed into pork, and pork into gammons, by the same omnipotent agency. Hatching eggs by steam is already an old story.

A patent for a new steam-plough was taken out in January of the present year by Mr. James Usher of Edinburgh; and another in June, by Messrs. Calloway and Purkiss. The peculiarity of the former consists in mounting “a series of ploughs in the same plane round an axis, so that the ploughs shall successively come into action;” and secondly, in applying power to give a rotary motion to the series, “so that the resistance of the earth to the ploughs, as they enter and travel through the earth, shall _cause the machine_ to be _propelled_”--instead of motion being communicated to the machine from the wheels which run on the land. The other invention--that of Messrs. Calloway and Purkiss--mainly consists of a number of chains working round a wheel, and fitted on the outside with ploughshares. Rotary motion is communicated by a locomotive.

“I consider,” says Sir Abel Handy, in the comedy of Speed the Plough, “that a healthy young man between the handles of a plough, is one of the noblest illustrations of the prosperity of Britain.” But shortly after saying this, Sir Abel invents a splendid curricle plough drawn by high-bred Leicestershire horses; who set off at full gallop with the plough at their heels over hill and dale, and instead of doing the allotted work a-field, they rush about at random, ploughing up Salisbury Plain. What would Sir Abel have said to Sir Willoughby de Eresby’s snorting steam-horse, perfectly under control?

His machinery consists of a locomotive engine, weighing only three-and-a-half tons, and of a twenty-six horse power. It was designed by Mr. Gooch. It has a double capstan attached, “removable, when the engine is required for other purposes.” His lordship does not indicate any of these; but we may fairly imagine that his farm-engine will possess the same versatile genius as the inventions which have preceded it. His description of this machinery is very brief, clear, and without the use of any technical terms.

“The engine moves across the centre of the field on a light, portable railway. The ploughs advance and recede on either side of the railway, at right angles to it.

“The ploughs employed consist of four ordinary, and four subsoil ploughs, fixed in a frame. It is directed by a person standing upon a small platform.

“Two such ploughs, one on either side the railway, alternately advance and recede; the advancing plough working, the other idle until it regains its proper position for ploughing the next four furrows. On the completion of the four furrows both ways, the engine and side frames advance each three feet.

“The ploughs are attached to an endless chain, one hundred and fifty yards in length. They can be detached at pleasure, or shifted from one side of the chain to the other. They travel at the rate of _five miles an hour_. Provision is made in case they strike against any impediment.”

Arrangements are also made to suit irregularly shaped fields. The full power of the engine is not exerted with the ploughs, as thus described; and the number of blades can be increased if desirable. And now for the next statement, which brings us to a most important consideration.

“In the present state of things, it is difficult to form a correct estimate of the value of the invention in a commercial point of view. I will only say that a machine of the power, and with the arrangement described, would perform the work usually done by _sixteen_ ploughs, driven by as many men, and drawn by thirty-two horses. Requiring itself the attendance of eight men, and a horse to draw the water for the engine, it would thus save the labour of thirty-one horses and eight men. Against this must be set an expense of five shillings a day for coals.”

In examining the question of economy in the use of steam-power instead of horses, we shall obtain valuable assistance from a paper addressed to Mr. J. T. Osborne, of Demerara, by the Council of the Highland Society. This paper sets the period of the productive labour of a horse against the unproductive period necessary for its rest, and exhibits results of a startling kind. Horses are fed and tended three hundred and sixty-five days of twenty-four hours, or eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours in the year. But they work only three hundred days, of about eight hours, taking the average, or two thousand four hundred hours a year. Thus we have a clear loss of six thousand three hundred and sixty hours of unproductive feeding and tending. It may be argued, that they are not fed and tended throughout the night, and therefore there is no such loss as the figures displayed by the Highland Society; but they are fed and tended enough to suffice them during the night, for which no compensating work is performed, so that it comes, we think, to nearly the same thing.

According to McCulloch, there are about one million two hundred thousand agricultural horses employed in Great Britain, which, at twenty-five pounds per head for maintenance, amounts to thirty millions sterling per annum for their keep. The unproductive portion, therefore, he finds amounting to the enormous sum of twenty-one millions seven hundred and eighty-five thousand three hundred and six pounds. It will be seen that this estimate is founded on the previous figures displaying the number of hours of feeding and tendence, compared with the number of hours’ work, and the consequent loss of six thousand three hundred and sixty hours. The only compensation for this loss of hours, represented by the above sum of upwards of twenty-one millions sterling, is in the value of the manure, which is thus produced at too great a cost.

“There are insuperable difficulties,” writes the Council of the Highland Society, “attending the employment of vital power; but mechanical power puts forth its energy when called for--it can be regulated, and, at pleasure, stopped. If it is desired to occupy the entire hours of daylight--to extend the field of operations--to work up more raw material--the energy of the animal ceases after a time; but not so that of the machine. The longest hours of summer may be advantageously employed.” And why not in the shortest nights of winter also? Could not steam-ploughs be made to carry their own lights with Hale Thomson’s patent silvered-glass reflectors, like other locomotives?

The next sentence brings us full-butt against the corner-stone of our social edifice, and moots the question as to the effect of machinery in increasing the demand for human labour:--“Were the whole period of daylight industriously employed in the most effective manner--that is, by the employment of machinery--the demand for human labour would be augmented in the exact ratio of the increased time, multiplied by the augmented force of the machinery.”

“Be fruitful and multiply,” said the God of Nature;--“You must be starved, if you do!” say the beldame economists. Meantime, an immense proportion of the habitable and fertile earth lies quite uncultivated, the vast seas are full of prolific food, and the land which _is_ cultivated, is not made the most of. The art of tilling has not kept pace with other improvements. Before the wonders of steam appeared in the world there was occasionally a random attempt to introduce some improvement in tillage, but the experiments originated in a wish rather than in any definite plan, and were of course a failure and an absurdity. Dean Swift brought his pungent satire to bear upon these attempts, in his account of the grand Academy of Lagado, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver says he was highly pleased with a projector who had discovered a plan for turning up the ground with hogs, to save the charge of ploughs, cattle, and labour. The method was beautifully simple. In a given field you bury at six inches distance, and eight inches deep, a quantity of acorns in long rows. You then drive six hundred hogs into the field, who, in search of the food they most love, will root or plough up the whole into furrows, with their snouts. The absurdities committed soon led to a cessation of all mere experiments, until at length came steam-engines, and thence, in due course, the dream of a steam-plough. This dream we are peradventure about to see realised in a few months; and then, though our million of agricultural horses will be diminished, our fine breed of Yorkshire and Lancashire ploughmen will not be thinned; any more than spinning and weaving machinery exterminated--as was awfully predicted it would--our army of spinners and weavers.

“I was bred to the plough,” said Robert Burns, when addressing a letter to the wealthy gentlemen of the Ayrshire Hunt:--“I am independent;” but it may turn out that the plough of old will soon be a sorry thing to depend upon. We are rather reminded of the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Ploughman Tale,” though he could have had no anticipation that his cessation from this labour would be final.

“The Ploughman pluckéd up his plough, When Midsomer moon was comen in, And saied his beasts should eat ynowe, And lye in the grasse up to the chin. He shook off shere, and coulter off drowe, And hongéd his harnis on a pin.”

“Our strongest hope for the improvement of our social condition,” says Miss Martineau, “lies in the directing of intelligence full upon the cultivation of the soil.” The more the powers of science are brought to bear upon the tillage of the earth, and the production and manufacture of food, the greater will be the number benefited, and the more speedily will Miss Martineau’s axiom be verified. Cordially coinciding with that lady, we wish all success to the important undertaking of Lord Willoughby de Eresby, and shall be glad to find he accomplishes and establishes what has hitherto been confined to experimental trials.

A SACRED GROVE.

Here Silence is the queen of time; her hand Is raised--and the tide trembles to a pause. Beauty, too awful to be loved, awakes And spell-binds Man’s repose. The sunken sun, Whose mantle’s gold is melted in the tint Of evening’s purple sadness, near the west Lingers awhile, as loth to quit the scene. Yet ’tis not sadness all; for though the trees, Heavy with cumbrous melancholy, sweep Their sombre-foliaged boughs close to the grass, And solemn twilight peers between the trunks, Tinging the dome of yonder vacant fane-- O’er all a spirit of subdued emotion Breathes in pathetic sweetness, deep diffused.

In this dim palace of grey Solitude, Where not a sigh wafts o’er the lily’s urn, And nought, save marble forms of tenderest grace, With pensive attitude stand in lone bowers-- The heart, upheaving into the fresh air, Itself abandons to the scene, and claims Kindred with placid Death, and those lost hopes That lived around the loved ones, now no more. Their tombs smile pale beneath these cypress boughs, Heavy with memory of all the past.

Moveless I stand before these moveless trees-- Breathless as those broad boughs; and gazing thus, At the dark foliage imaged in the pools, Which deepen, as the brooding mind surveys Their trance and awful beauty; ’tis a scene That lures us backward to an elder time, Through ages dim--and, thence, into a realm Whose secret influence fills us with its soul-- Shadows of things which are not of the world, And hopes that burn, yet find no vent save tears.

“CAPE” SKETCHES.

Cape Wants are neither peculiar nor numerous. Captain Smoke, in Jerrold’s comedy of “Bubbles of the Day,” confides to his friend, Lord Skindeep, that he is “terribly in want of a thousand pounds.” The reply is “You may take it as a general rule, Captain Smoke, that _every man_ wants a thousand pounds.” As with men so with Colonies. The sun never sets upon one of the dependencies of Great Britain, young or old, which would not be the better for a thousand pounds. Our Colonies feel, however, another want;--it is for something to which the Smokes of the old country show a very marked aversion; and that is labour. “Capital and labour!” is a cry which reaches us from every quarter of the earth. The demand does not resound so loudly perhaps from the Cape as from other and newer Colonies; but the want of the first necessities of enterprise, civilisation, and progress is not the less felt. Any sort of European labour (except convict labour), any kind of capital, is welcome in our South African dependencies; and in the long run “pays.”

As to Capital; men with from two thousand pounds to ten thousand pounds will find plenty of most profitable employment for their money. The Colony has innumerable resources--amongst them I may mention her fisheries and her mineral treasures. The former produce a large revenue even now, though carried on, from want of enterprise and capital, in the most unsystematic and slovenly manner. Of minerals there is abundance; ore in many places actually lying on the surface. The assegais (or spears) of the Kafirs are all made of iron, smelted and welded by themselves; while recent travellers from the northernmost extremity of the Colony bring accounts of innumerable implements in use among the savage tribes there, formed of iron of their own manufacture. Copper and lead have been discovered within fifteen miles of Algoa Bay.

But such riches remain utterly unproductive without facile means of transport, and a great want in the Colony is good roads. Of course, want of labour is the cause of this deficiency, which is, however, being slowly remedied by the local government. Whether the Cape Colonists were wise in rejecting the convicts, so kindly proffered to them by Lord Grey, I shall not presume to opine, because I have a notion that everybody knows their own business best; but we must not forget that New South Wales owes the blessing of her good roads to what was, it must be admitted, in other respects, a great curse to her--the bands of convicts the Colonial Office were so obliging as to send her.

Before I dilate on the greatest of all colonial wants, I will mention what the Cape of Good Hope does _not_ want; namely, young gentlemen with white hands and empty pockets, of no profession, and with very extensive notions of refinement. She does not require martinet “half-pays,” who know more of pipe-clay than of soils, and more of killing than of breeding and fattening. Fine ladies, who are proficient pianistes, and do not understand poultry, she is much better without. What she _does_ require, are:--In the towns, mechanics and artisans of all kinds; in the country, good farmers and sturdy dames, shepherds and agricultural labourers; in both, domestic servants, male and female. For all these the Cape is open, and it offers them first-rate livelihoods, abundance of food of the best description, and a climate which the returns taken of the mortality among the troops prove to be amongst the healthiest in all Her Majesty’s world-wide dominions. The Colony has also one great advantage over Australia--it is ten thousand miles nearer to England.

Want the third in point of importance is a change in the present system of selecting Colonial Governors. Were we to choose Generals to lead our armies--not from soldiers trained to arms and distinguished in the field--but from decayed statesmen, who had “never set a squadron in the field,” nor even handled a sword; would not our enemies not only beat us, but laugh at us? Yet conversely we commit precisely this absurdity: we “reward” meritorious Generals by appointing them Governors; of whose duties they are, as a rule, as ignorant as a Lord of the Treasury is of fortification. The Governor of a Colony, as the representative of the highest power in the Empire, is required to fulfil the highest civil functions; to conduct the most difficult and delicate negotiations; and we select a brave old General, who hardly knows the geography of his government; is profoundly ignorant of the habits and requirements of its people; who never even pretended to statesmanship, and either commits himself to something so rash that it makes everybody angry, or to something so silly that it makes everybody laugh.

* * * * *

In Education, England might take a lesson from her South African dependency--it is in the education of the people. Government schools are established in every town, and almost every village of the Colony, open to children of all classes and all creeds, and free of all expense. They are presided over by intelligent teachers, chiefly selected from the Scotch Universities, and truly their pupils do these gentlemen infinite credit. I do not hesitate to say, that the rising generation of the Cape Colony will be the best educated men of their class in all the British Empire. It is to Dr. Jones, the former President of the South African College, in Cape Town, that the colony is indebted for this invaluable boon. Even the population in the far interior are better off in this respect than the children of our English peasantry. Thanks to the energy of Campbell, Latrobe, Moffat, and other energetic, common-sense, as well as pious, members of the Missionary Society; the children of the Hottentots, Griquas, and even of some of the Bechuanas, are fast being brought into the pale of civilisation by attendance at the schools established by those gentlemen. Some of the offspring of English parents in the “interior” of England, have no such schools to attend.

* * * * *

Sheep Farming is, perhaps, the best and most profitable occupation at the Cape. It is far better than agriculture, and better than cattle farming, for the following reasons. The great deficiency of the colony is the want of sufficient water for irrigation. Wherever this want is not felt, all kinds of grain may be raised with profit, and Cape wheat is universally pronounced to be the finest in the world. But the farms, or portions of farms, on which it can be grown are few and far between. Nor is this the only drawback to agriculture; the farmer has two other dire enemies to contend with. The one is the blight or “smut,” which is very common; and frequently destroys whole crops. Two young friends of mine hired a farm in partnership, and, in spite of the warnings of more experienced persons, determined to turn their principal attention to agriculture. They went to great expense in the purchase of agricultural implements, paid the highest wages for labourers, and worked with their own hands as hard as any ploughman in England. They raised a magnificent crop, and began to indulge a sweet reverie on the “Dollars” it was to bring them. Alas, the “smut” came, and the beautiful crop was destroyed, while not one solitary dollar found its way into the young farmers’ pockets. Disappointed, but not disheartened, they set to work again, and next year with precisely the same result. Luckily they were prudent fellows, and had neither been personally extravagant, nor sunk all their money in one enterprise. They, therefore, purchased some sheep, cattle, and horses, and only cultivated a very _small portion_ of their farm; and now they are among the most prosperous farmers in the Colony.