AGRICULTURAL POPULATION. 39 



to meet, in England or Scotland, with a single instance of negli 

 gence in any private house which I have visited ; but, on the 

 other hand, the most exemplary neatness. I cannot say as much 

 of all the hotels or taverns in the country, many of which are 

 far inferior in all respects, and none of them superior in any, to 

 our best hotels. There is one circumstance in English manners 

 so much to the credit of their housekeeping, that I shall, for the 

 best of reasons, venture to remind my American friends of it, 

 although I fear that any reformation in the case is hopeless. In 

 no private house which I have visited have I been smothered or 

 offended with tobacco smoke ; and I have seen the offensive and 

 useless habit of chewing tobacco since I came to England in but 

 one solitary instance, and that was on the part of an American. 

 At public dinners, the same reserve is not practised, and the 

 atmosphere becomes as thick as a London fog. I will not inter 

 fere with any gentleman s private pleasures ; but I will lose no 

 fair opportunity of protesting against a practice which has little 

 to recommend it, and in respect to which I think we have good 

 grounds to ask, What right has any man to indulge in any 

 mere personal or selfish gratification, in-doors or without, at the 

 expense of his neighbor s comfort ? I know very well the value- 

 to my own country, as a branch of agriculture, of the produc 

 tion of tobacco ; but I cannot look upon its cultivation with 

 much complacency. Nor does the exhausted condition of the 

 soil, where tobacco has been some time cultivated, reconcile me 

 to its culture. Indeed, how much were it to be wished that 

 instead of the production of an article useless for subsistence and 

 pernicious to health, there could be substituted the cultivation 

 of plants for the food and comfort of millions now suffering from 

 the want of them ! 



3. THE AGRICULTURAL LABORERS. Next to the farmers come 

 the laborers ; and these three classes preserve the lines of distinc 

 tion among them with as much caution and strictness, as they 

 preserve the lines and boundaries of their estates. These dis 

 tinctions strike a visitor from the United States with much 

 force; but, in England, they have been so long established 

 are so interwoven in the texture of society and men are, by 

 education and habit, so trained in them, that their propriety or 

 expediency is never matter of question. The nobleman will 

 sometimes, as an act of courtesy and kindness, invite his tenant- 

 farmer to his table ; but such a visit is never expected to be 



