Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
one
Railways and Agriculture in France
and Great Britain, 1850-1914
Robert M. Schwartz and Thomas Thevenin
Losses year after year and increasing competition indicate that
the crops now grown are not sufficient to support the farmer.
W hen he endeavors, however, to vary his method of culture, and
to introduce something new, he is met at the outset by two great
difficulties. . . . The first [is] the extraordinary tithe . . . ; the second
is really even more important - it is the deficiency of transit. . . .
It is not too much to say that three parts of England are
quite as much in need of opening up as the backwoods of
America. W hen a new railroad track is pushed over [American]
prairie and through primeval woods, setlements spring up
beside it. W hen road trains [in Britain] run through remote
hamlets, those remote hamlets will awake to a new life.
Richard Jefferies,
“Steam on Country Roads,” 1884
1
After reflecting on American agriculture and r ailroads,
R ichard Jefferies, an agricultural journalist, saw one thing clearly: Brit-
ain must catch up. Goods trains in agrarian America, he wrote, stopped
not merely at stations but virtually anywhere along the line where there
were grain and produce to pick up. The British farmer, alas, enjoyed no
such convenience. To get crops and produce to market was a struggle.
4
