322 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



useless and unoccupied? The English, as I have before had 

 occasion to remark, and I do it certainly as far as possible 

 removed from any spirit of censoriousness or ill-humor, are 

 excessively conservative. Their judges still swelter under their 

 full-bottomed wigs ; and their courtiers and civilians, in the midst 

 of crowds of gentle ladies, wear swords on state occasions, when 

 there is reason to think that some of them, if called upon to 

 draw and defend themselves, would scarcely know which end to 

 seize upon. I am not for indiscriminate changes ; but I go for 

 universal improvement, wherever the improvement to be made is 

 obvious, decided, practicable, and remunerative. If otherwise, 

 what is the value of experience and of education ? and how idle 

 it is to talk of the progress of society ! Even in this matter of 

 chartered rights, the government, with an inconsistency not un 

 common, does not hesitate to take private property for public 

 uses, and to invade the property even of charitable trusts for the 

 passage of railroads, which, whatever may be said of their public 

 uses, can scarcely be considered in any other light than as 

 private corporations. I should be glad to know what business 

 has a dead man with the affairs of the living ; and what has a 

 man to do with the earth after he has left it? He has had his 

 day, and is of no further use in it, excepting in the good example 

 which he may have left behind him. Indeed, as Goldsmith 

 remarks, he takes care to rob it of what little he might return 

 for its benefit, by ordering himself to be buried six feet below 

 the surface. The earth belongs exclusively to those who 

 occupy it. It seems to me to behoove us much more to take 

 care for the good of those who are to come after us, and may be 

 essentially affected by what we do, than for the wills of those 

 who have gone before us whom what we do, or are, cannot 

 affect at all ; and who themselves, if they were now living, 

 would see, in a change of circumstances, the absurdity, or use- 

 lessness, or inconvenience, or hardship, of the arrangements 

 which they propose, and be among the foremost to condemn 

 and alter them. If public faith requires that the wills of those 

 who have departed should be observed, it should take care that 

 the objects for which those wills provide should be in them 

 selves just, reasonable, and useful, as long as that provision may 

 continue ; but the locking up of land in perpetuum, for private 

 or public uses, seems of very questionable right and expediency. 



