Marshall’s main criticism of the Board of Agriculture's “tourist” surveyors is temporal, but it can be assuaged, in part, by spatial considerations: commissioning a local resident to survey his native county might make up for the haste with which the surveys needed to be conducted. Localism compensates for nationalism when time is of the essence. Stone lends a bit of support to this conceptualization of the efficacy of survey work; granting the major premise of haste in a way that Marshall never does, Stone argues that the surveyor must be local or “a habitual visitor [. . .] when a surveyor has not an oppourtunity of feeling land at different seasons of the year” (xi). Given the abbreviated timeline that the Board imposed on the surveyors’ work, Stone felt that hiring local residents was the only way to ensure accurate and in-depth information: “he would be careful in examining the soil which lies under the surface” (xii).If one more civilian asks me how much longer until I'm done, I may just rip off his or her head and kick it down the street like a soccer ball.
My boy William (no, not Wordsworth--the other Bill in my life) has this to say:
We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."
jump to 5:40
