TRANSACTIONS. 49 



trade and manufactures, wliicli lias sought investments in 

 lands, and the extension of pastoral husbandry, sheep 

 breeding, especially, which has converted millions of acres 

 of well peopled arable soil into broad pastures, inhabited 

 only by the shepherd and his flock. 



The estates of the great proprietors are doubtless more 

 scientifically cultivated than when they were divided into 

 smaller portions, and the liberal application of capital and 

 intelligence has carried English agriculture to a pitch of 

 perfection perhaps never on a great scale realized else- 

 where. The marketable products, and probably the total 

 material which contributes to human sustenance, have been, 

 largely increased, but yet, while the entire population 

 has doubled in fifty years, the rural districts have in 

 many instances lost almost all their inhabitants. Hund- 

 dreds of thousands of the classes whom it was most impor- 

 tant to retain, have emigrated to America, Africa, Australia 

 and Xew Zealand, because they could find no rest for the sole 

 of their feet on the soil that bore them. Others are absorb- 

 ed by the demands of the manufacturing system ; others in 

 the construction and working of railroads and their acces- 

 sories ; others in the increase of the commercial marine, 

 and others, again, enter into that vast accretion, for it can- 

 not be called organic growth, by which the great cities of 

 England have swollen to such unnatural and disproportion- 

 ate bulk. 



Thus the class of small proprietors and tenants upon 

 long leases, who cultivated their own lands, and who were 

 justly regarded as the best reliance of the State in every 

 critical emergency, has now quite disappeared, or been 

 greatly reduced in numbers, in moral force and in physical 

 power. With the smaller agriculturists have vanished 

 also the small tradesmen and mechanics. Not only are 

 homespun clothing and all household manufactures obso- 

 lete, but every rural implement, every article of clothing, 

 from felt to sole-leather, is brought ready-made from some 

 4 



