VI.] KEEPING PIGS, 87 



when I lived at Botley, proposed to the copyholders 

 and other farmers in my neighbourhood, that we 

 should petition the Bishop of Winchester, who was 

 lord of the manors thereabouts, to grant titles to all 

 the numerous persons called trespassers on the wastes; - 

 and also to give titles to others of the poor parishion- 

 ers, who were willing to make, on the skirts of the 

 wastes, enclosures not exceeding an acre each. This 

 I am convinced, would have done a great deal towards 

 relieving the parishes, then greatly burdened by men 

 out of work. This would have been better than dig- 

 ging holes one day to fill them up the next. Not a 

 single man would agree to my proposal ! One, a bull- 

 frog farmer (now, I hear, pretty well sweated down,) 

 said it would only make them saucy I And one, a 

 true disciple of Malthus, said, that to facilitate their 

 rearing of children was a harm ! This man had, at 

 the time, in his own occupation, land that had formerly 

 been six farms^ and he had, too, ten or a dozen chil- 

 dren. I will not mention names ; but this farmer 

 will now, perhaps, have occasion to call to mind what 

 I told him on that day, when his opposition, and par- 

 ticularly the ground of it, gave me the more pain, as 

 he was a very industrious, civil, and honest man. 

 Never was there a greater mistake than to suppose 

 that men are made saucy and idle by just and kind 

 treatment. Slaves are always lazy and saucy ; no- 

 thing but the lash will extort from them either labour 

 or respectful deportment. I never met with a saucy 

 Yankee (New Englander) in my life. Never servile ; 

 always civil. This must necessarily be the character 

 of freemen living in a state of competence. They 

 have nobody to envy ; nobody to complain of; they 

 are in good humour with mankind. It must, how- 

 ever, be confessed, that very little, comparatively 

 speaking, is to be accomplished by the individual ef- 

 forts even of benevolent men like the two noblemen 

 before mentioned. They have a strife to maintain 

 against the general tendency of the national state of 

 things. It is by general and indirect means, and not 

 by partial and direct and positive regulations, that so 



