Cultivation and Tenure of Land. 623 



without reference to any other consideration. In England, on 

 the other hand, the hmdhnxls liave acted under the influence 

 partly of personal sympathies and attachments, and still more of 

 a desire to keep up their political power, and they can, generally 

 speaking, afford to make pecuniary considerations subordinate to 

 such motives. 



Well, in Jersey and Guernsey you see the precise converse of 

 what I have been describing. Instead of large farms, scientific 

 agriculture, and a shifting tenantry of educated gentlemen- 

 farmers, with large cajntal and commercial ideas, you have farms 

 averaging 10 acres (each farm generally a separate estate), primi- 

 tive though careful cultivation, families living upon and farming 

 the same land for hundreds of years, arid apparently much in 

 the same way and witli the same tools as hundreds of years ago. 

 Each of these little estates or farms is divided from its neighbour 

 by an immense hedgerow, so that the country from a height looks 

 like a continuous wood. The farmhouses are substantial stone 

 buildings, as good externally as ordinary farmhouses in AVar- 

 wickshire, but the people live, I was told, more hardl}^ and 

 poorlv than English labom'ers, very rarely eating meat, and 

 scarcely taking as much rest as is sufficient to preserve health, 

 such is tlieir covetous industry. The amount of produce that 

 they get out of the land is marvellous, the average rent of it 

 being quite 4/, an acre. It is curious to see how each of the two 

 systems I have been describing, op])osed as they are to each 

 other, results in immense produce, far greater than what may be 

 called the intermediate system, which prevails in England, does. 

 I suppose, the largest amount of all is produced in the Channel 

 Islands, but then tliey have great advantages in their soil and 

 climate (which, I think, are on the whole more favourable to 

 vegetation than any other that I have seen), in the abundance, 

 close at hand, of seaweed manure, in (what may be called) an 

 artificial market afforded by 4(J00 or 5000 resident strangers, 

 and in the remarkably industrious, laborious, and acquisitive 

 character of the Norman race which inhabits them — a cha- 

 racter which appears to compensate l)y the possession of those 

 qualities for the want of Anglo-Saxon intelligence and enter- 

 prise. At any rate, the rural economy of Guernsey and Jersey 

 is not transj)lantal)le ; it may subsist and prosper indefinitely 

 in these days where it has been handed down, but no one 

 would thjnk of creating it wlicre it did not exist ; whereas the 

 Scotcii system, with all its drawbacks (and in a moral and social 

 point of view they are many), is conceived in the very spirit of 

 the age, and will, I have no doubt, eventually prevail throughout 

 the whole of this kingdom. 



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