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 mediæval 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. labourers, too, whom our land system crowds into towns, have not that subsidiary and durable resource which town labourers on the Continent are steadily gaining under their land system; nor have English labourers that providence and frugality which continental land systems nurture. The Irish land question is of more importance politically than the English for the hour, but it is not so economically even for the hour; and it is so politically for the hour only. Economically, the emergency is much greater at this moment in this than in the other island; the main land question here relates to a poorer class than even the Irish tenantry, and there is a much greater amount of material misery and actual destitution in England, traceable mainly to its own land system, though aggravated by that of Ireland and the consequent immigration of poverty. The day is not distant when the supreme question of English, as of Irish politics, will be whether the national territory is to be the source of power and luxury to a few individuals, or of prosperity and happiness to the nation at large? and whether those few individuals or the nation at large are to determine the answer? WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN,* In few places are the old world and the new, the world of immobility and custom, and the world of change and progress, seen in closer proximity and contrast than in Westphalia; a province now heading the rapid march of Prussian industry, yet preserving not a few broad features of the Germany of the past. By the side of the peasant of the olden time, whom the conservative economist Herr Riehl, in his dread of revolution, regards as the emblem of all that is sound in the age, and the sole safeguard of the future of Germany, are the engineer, the miner, and the manufacturer, whom English economists, unable to boast of their own peasantry, are commonly better inclined to put forward as the types of the age, and the pledges of the future. The Basin of the Ruhr, occupying the middle region of the province, and reaching beyond it to the Rhine, is the chief seat of Westphalian mining and manufacturing enterprise; the mountains and valleys of Sauerland and Siegerland † in the south are the * Reprinted from the 'Fortnightly Review,' March, 1869. + The general name of Sauerland is given to the mountainous region of Westphalia south of the Ruhr Basin. The country watered by the Sieg bears the name of Siegerland; the greater part of it, however, lying beyond Westphalia in the Rhine Province. strongholds of ancient rural life. But the genuine bauer is not extinct in the Ruhr Basin; and the train glides, the tall chimney rises, and the miner sinks his shafts and drives his adits among the southern hills. The prevailing characteristics, nevertheless, in the south are still those of rustic simplicity, and we may give to antiquity in our description the precedence it will not long survive to claim. The scenery of southern Westphalia is eminently picturesque in the sense to which Mr. Merivale limits the term, as denoting effects due not to the imagination of the spectator bodying forth the forms of things unseen, but simply to the picture which nature herself puts before the eye. The traveller does not bring, but finds the charm of the landscape in steep wood-clothed hills and winding vales, with cottages and gardens clustering here and there. Most refreshing to the eye of the traveller from parched England last summer was the deep verdure of these valleys, though it was a year of drought also Westphalian. The perfection of the irrigation, the works for which serve also for draining, is celebrated over the continent of Europe, affording a practical refutation of the doctrine of some insular writers that peasants cannot accomplish such works. The rainfall is equal to that of Ireland, and it falls with such violence that all the elements of fertility would be washed off the hills but for the care with which they are planted; while the bas-fonds below would be now soaked into morasses, and now baked into aridity, but for the skill with which the descending streams are collected and distributed. |