118 CAUSES OF THE DECLINE 



older and more settled parts to sell and go north-we 

 where land is cheap and greater profits are to be mad 

 In a word, the opening up of the new corn district there i 

 acting in the same way as the development of manufacture 

 did in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 



True the small owner might, and sometimes did, cling 

 to his little property, and meet the difficulty of want of 

 money by mortgaging his estate. But he was on slippery 

 ground. Nothing is so demoralizing as debt, and, if the 

 first man who mortgaged did it to improve his farm, some 

 one of his successors would be sure to do it for more selfish 

 reasons to keep up his position, and that of his daughters, 

 : f not to spend the money in reckless extravagance. In 

 any case, the mortgage once raised, it was much more 

 likely to be increased than to be paid off. Hence the 

 result was the same in the end; the property was sold. 

 And this is the real answer to the question whether the 

 small landowner went because he wished to go or because 

 was obliged. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other. 



Even the squire above him, that is, the owner of estat 

 of 500 to 600 a year, was in much the same positi 

 ' There are not/ says a writer in 1731, ( poorer men in the 

 world than these gentlemen of small estates and large 

 families. They are obliged to serve expensive and unprofit- 

 able offices, to be high sheriffs and justices of the peace, to 

 their very great burthen and grievance. They have no 

 way to raise or improve their fortunes ; nor industry, nor 

 ability can be of use to them while they continue country , 

 gentlemen. They can only preserve their estates with 

 much difficulty, but cannot acquire new fortunes. Thei 

 properties are often entailed, and, what is worse, encu 

 bered. If they mortgage their lands their mortgages a 



1 Froude, Short Studies, Uses of a landed Gentry ; Rae, Why 

 Yeomen gone, Contemp. Review, 1883 ; Hasbach, pp. 103, 105. 



