Arthur Young (writer) - Modern Assessments

Modern Assessments

More recently attention has moved to the small print of his writings and Young has been studied for his methods of investigation. Richard Stone (1997) presents him as a pioneer national income statistician, continuing the work of Gregory King who had lived a century before. Young produced three estimates of the national income of England, in his Tour through the North of England, Farmer's Tour through the East of England and in his Political Arithmetic. Brunt (2001) emphasises the way Young collected his information and presents him as a pioneer of sample surveys. Young influenced such contemporary observers of economic and social life as Frederick Morton Eden and Sinclair.

Arthur Young was the greatest of all English writers on agriculture; but it is as a social and political observer that he is best known, and his Tour in Ireland and Travels in France are still full of interest and instruction. He saw clearly and exposed unsparingly the causes which retarded the progress of Ireland. He strongly urged the repeal of the penal laws which pressed upon the Catholics; he condemned the restrictions imposed by Great Britain on the commerce of Ireland, and also the perpetual interference of the Irish parliament with industry by prohibitions and bounties. He favoured a legislative union of Ireland with Great Britain, though he did not regard such a measure as absolutely necessary, many of its advantages being otherwise attainable.

He thought the soil of France superior to that of England, but noted that agriculture was neither as well understood nor as highly regarded as in England. He blamed the upper classes for their neglect of it. "Banishment (from court) alone will force the French nobility to execute what the English do for pleasure — reside upon and adorn their estates." Young saw the commencement of violence in the rural districts, and his sympathies began to take the side of the classes suffering from the excesses of the Revolution. This change of attitude was shown by his publication in 1793 of a tract entitled The Example of France a Warning to England. Of the profounder significance of the French outbreak he seems to have had little idea, and thought the crisis would be met by a constitutional adjustment in accordance with the English type. He strongly condemned the metayer system, then widely prevalent in France, as "perpetuating poverty and excluding instruction"—as, in fact, the ruin of the country. Some of his phrases have been often quoted by the advocates of peasant proprietorship as favouring their view.

• "The magic of property turns sand to gold."
• "Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert."

But these sentences, in which the epigrammatic form exaggerates a truth, and which might seem to represent the possession of capital as of no importance in agriculture, must not be taken as conveying his approbation of the system of small properties in general. He approved it only when the subdivision was strictly limited, and even then with great reserves; and he remained to the end what John Stuart Mill calls him, "the apostle of la grande culture".

The Directory in 1801 ordered his writings on the art to be translated and published at Paris in 20 volumes under the title of Le Cultivateur anglais. His Travels in France were translated in 1793/1794 by Soules; a new version by M. Lesage, with an introduction by M. de Lavergne, appeared in 1856. An interesting review of the latter publication, under the title of Arthur Young et la France de 1789, will be found in M. Baudrillart's Publicistes modernes (Paris 1st ed., 1862).