speaking on the transfer of land in 1862, does any of you know anything about your titles to your estates? Is there not dwelling upon every estate, or rather sitting upon the shoulders of every land proprietor, a solicitor, who guides him in all things, controls him in all things. Talk of a priest-ridden country! That we are a lawyer-ridden country, with regard to the conditions of real property, is a truth beyond the possibility of denial. What has thrown light upon every subject of knowledge? It has been the introduction of printing. Why has not printing been introduced into legal deeds? Why is it that you have presented to you a mass of parchment, so repulsive in its character, so utterly forbidding in its condition, its language, and even the style of its writing, that you surrender yourselves in despair? You do not know what you are signing."

It is not, however, the lawyer, but the large proprietor, seeking to re-establish in a commercial age the territorial system of the middle age, who has kept land out of commerce, surrounded it with prohibitions, pitfalls and snares, devoted it to the maintenance of family pride, hidden all his dealings with it in darkness, and committed them to writing in characters symbolical of the period to which in policy and spirit they belong. With such a land system before us, such a history behind it, and such marks of that history in its every detail, is it possible to maintain that it is the commercial and not the feudal spirit which in England has

Compare with these remarks those of Jack Cade, respecting parchments and signatures, cited supra.

worked against peasant properties'? What is it but the commercial spirit, a commercial jurisprudence, an open land market, the progress of trade, manufactures and mines, the increasing demand for and the increasing profits of minute cultivation, together with that natural love of land which every disciple of Adam Smith must include among the economic laws determining human pursuits, that augment every year the number of peasant properties bought in the market in Germany, Belgium, and France? It is doubtless true that, under a just and natural system, and with perfect free trade in land, there would have been a disappearance of some peasant and yeoman properties, and a departure of others from former owners and families. Failures, casualties, deaths, the decline of domestic manufactures, changes in husbandry and in markets, changes in the localities of towns and in trade, both internal and foreign, the attractions of towns, the tastes of particular men, succession to land by women*. these and other natural causes would, undoubtedly, under a sound system, have caused a natural and continual flow of small properties, of both yeomen and peasants, into the market. But this outward flow could not have been confined to the small properties, and there would always have been an opposite current. The profits of ground under the master's foot, the natural attractions of agriculture and country life, the love of independence, the accumulation of savings

It deserves remark, however, that women make excellent farmers both in England and on the Continent, when they can devote their time to it. In the dairy districts of England the wife is a more important per

son than her husband.

among a large rural population promoted by the possibility of such an investment, the ideas and tastes engendered by a numerous class of small proprietors, the diffusion of land by a just law of succession, would have filled many of the vacant places of those who dropped out of the ranks, and added new regiments to the whole number.*

But only one current has been suffered to flow in respect of small estates-an outward current, largely swollen in former times by force and fraud, and in

* Great complaints are made that the class of farmer-owners-the old yeomanry-has largely diminished. There can be no doubt that this class of people would have been from time to time renewed far more than it has been, had land come more freely into the market. It is obvious that, if not renewed, any such class must gradually disappear through deaths, extravagance, and the countless chances and changes which must occur in every class' (Thoughts on Free Trade in Land, by William Fowler, M.P. 1869. Longman). This treatise contains a great amount of information in a very small compass. But the present author cannot concur in Mr. Fowler's next observation on the foregoing topic, unless limited to England under its present legal system: 'But a more powerful influence has been in operation, inasmuch as it is clear that a man with only a moderate capital can in England use his capital better as a farmer than as a proprietor as well as farmer, because he will thus have all his money free for use in his trade as a cultivator; in short, of having a large sum locked up at a low rate of interest in the price of his land.'

Under a good legal system the price of the land need not be locked up. The owner can either borrow on it easily, safely and cheaply, and either farm more intensively, or take adjoining land and farm more extensively. M. de Laveleye has answered by anticipation Mr. Fowler's argument, in his excellent book on the rural economy of Holland :- M. Roscher prétend que le fermier appliquera à faire valoir la terre plus de capital que le propriétaire, parce que celui-ci devra consacrer à l'achat du fonds une somme considérable, que le premier peut employer à augmenter l'intensité de la culture. Cette remarque est spécieuse; je ne la crois cependant pas fondée. En effet, celui qui aura acheté le fonds peut lever sur hypothèque la somme nécessaire pour améliorer sa culture; il paiera alors sous forme d'intérêts ce qu'il aurait payé comme fermage, et il aura cet énorme avantage, qu'il profitera exclusivement de toutes les améliorations, en qualité de propriétaire, sans risquer de les voir tourner à son détriment à l'expiration du bail.'—La Néerlande. Par Émile de Laveleye, p. 147.

modern times by unjust legislation and a barbarous jurisprudence; while the number of large estates has been artificially maintained by restraints on their division and sale, and the current towards them artificially swollen by the political power and the consequence attached to them. In place of a natural selection having determined the extinction of the small proprietor, the very struggle for existence would have lent to the peasant powerful aid against his more indolent rival. But what trade could survive if, besides being loaded with heavy penalties and restrictions, it were closed against all new comers? What army could outlast a campaign if, while exposed to cruel losses and hardships, the posts only of officers falling could be filled?

A learned writer has lately advanced the proposition that agricultural tenure in England, after passing from the medieval form of tenure at will into freehold and free copyhold tenure, became and continues to be a hereditary tenure; and that the main difference between the English and the Irish land systems lies in the permanent tenure established in England and the precarious tenure existing in Ireland. The truth is,

'In this country, by force of the old traditions of freehold tenure, and the tendency it had created in favour of permanent occupancy, and by force also of the universal custom of tenant-right, perpetuity of tenancy was practically, though not legally, secured. ; and hence, as a

learned author states (Mr. Dixon's Law of the Farm), the same farms descend in the same families generation after generation, sometimes century after century, in some cases for four hundred years . . . . Had there been no disturbing causes, the English law might have operated in Ireland, as in England, to produce that result. But the civil wars, and confiscations which ensued, placed the landlords as a body in opposition to the mass of

that the great bulk of the tenants of England, and with them no small body of small proprietors, sank long ago into the condition of agricultural labourers, or migrated to towns-such towns as the loss of a country custom and the accumulation of land in uncommercial hands did not destroy or prevent from coming into existence.

An enormous disproportion of the English population has thus been forced by the land system into a few large cities, and thrown upon precarious employments for support. Manufactures and trade are not only precarious in being subject to sudden vicissitudes and collapse, but in a more general respect, on which Adam Smith has emphatically dwelt.* The English

the people, and the penal laws which followed prevented the latter from acquiring any desirable interest in land. Thus the relation of landlord and tenant was never, as in England, based upon an inheritable tenure, originally established by law, and then perpetuated by custom, and protected by tenant-right.'-History of the Law of Tenures of Land in England and Ireland. By W. J. Finlason, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, Editor of Reeves' History of the English Law.

* The capital that is acquired to any country by commerce and manufactures is all a very precarious and uncertain possession till some part of it has been secured and realised in the cultivation and improvement of the land. . . . No vestige now remains of the great wealth said to have been possessed by the greater part of the Hanse Towns. The civil wars of Flanders, and the Spanish Government which succeeded them, chased away the great commerce of Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. But Flanders still continues to be one of the richest, best cultivated, and most prosperous provinces of Europe. The ordinary revolutions of war and government easily dry up the sources of that wealth which arises from commerce only. That which arises from the more solid improvements of agriculture is much more durable, and cannot be destroyed but by those more violent convulsions occasioned by the depredations of hostile and barbarous nations, continued for a century or two together, such as those that happened for some time before and after the fall of the Roman empire, in the western provinces of Europe.'-Wealth of Nations, book iii. c. 4.