ANCIENT AGRICULTUEAL LITERATURE. 191 



the moistness of our climate diminished the sacrifice, and 

 perhaps also increased the efficacy. In addition to this 

 remedy, we now possess a preventive. We prevent the 

 exhaustion of our lands by the application of adventitious 

 manures. But the remedy, whatever its deficiencies, is not 

 attended by outlay. It is simply a pro tempore abandon- 

 ment of cultivation. On the other hand, the preventive, 

 to which we have given the fanciful name of high farming, 

 is altogether dependent upon outlay. An outcry for the 

 application of increased capital to farming is evidence that 

 a state of exhaustion has been reached, or is in immediate 

 prospect. When Sir R. Peel tells his tenants that an 

 average produce of about 2 to 2^ quarters of wheat per 

 acre cannot pay, he indicates that their lands have ap- 

 proached the state which Columella describes to have been 

 reached in Italy.* To this result of their agriculture the 

 Romans never systematically adopted a preventive, nor 

 did they contrive any specific remedy. Their business was 

 to conquer and rob the world : their provinces bore an 

 overwhelming proportion to their domestic limits. So it is 

 in our case : but our connection with our outlying depen- 

 dencies was never framed on Roman principles, and their 

 wide compass will not absolve us from the necessity of 

 turning our attention, with painful intensity, on our inter- 

 nal resources. 



Though the Romans never practised the resting system, 

 any description of modern agriculture which should pass 

 it by would be incomplete. In a new country a settler sub- 

 dues a piece of land, flogs it to death and abandons the 

 carcase, and then repeats the operation on a new subject. 

 That is the agricultural system in large portions of the 

 United States. A great part of Russian Finland consists 

 of low irregular hills, which yield a spontaneous growth 

 of fir-wood. When the trees in this puny forest have at- 

 tained the size of a fence-rail, the cultivator sets it on fire, 



* From a printed circular letter of Sir Robert Peel's to his tenants 

 Drayton Manor, Dec. 24, 1849. 



