ANCIENT AGRICULTURAL LITERATURE. 195 



similar circumstances guided, we hope, by a sure instinct, 

 which we blindly follow without comprehending it the 

 agriculturists make an universal rush to produce more. 

 Everybody is determined to confute Malthus, and to prove 

 to him that he misplaced the ratios that the agricultural 

 ratio of increase will double the produce of a rural district 

 much sooner than the procreative ratio will double the 

 population. Sir Robert Peel tells his tenants that 2 or 2j 

 quarters per acre cannot pay. No doubt that is so. A gross 

 produce of 4Z. or 5Z. per acre from the golden crop of the 

 series cannot sustain a landlord, a tenant, a rector, police, 

 bridges, gaols, churches, lunatic asylums, union workhouses, 

 labourers, and a chancellor of the exchequer. We must 

 have 3 or 3 quarters per acre more. Mr. Huxtable, Mr. 

 Hudson, and all of us, are solving, or endeavouring to 

 solve, the problem how to buy them (for buy them we must) 

 for less than they will fetch in the market. We are trying 

 to confute the Roman maxim " bene colere necessarium 

 est, optime damnosum." Our faith, if we have any, is in 

 the power of consumption. We trust that the stomachs of 

 all Her Majesty's subjects are in a course of progressive 

 dilation. " Produce more," say statesmen authoritatively, 

 philosophers dogmatically, protectionists dolefully, free- 

 traders fiercely. If we were to suggest " produce cheaper," 

 we hardly know whether we should meet with a seconder. 

 This indeed would involve many severe struggles which we 

 would fain be spared. Visions of the disruption of ancient 

 connections of the extinction of some deserving classes 

 of the application of the rule and square to the face of the 

 country flit painfully before our eyes. Having seen the 

 domestic spindle and loom swept into the unsightly factory 

 almost every independent brook-side producer, in every 

 class, absorbed into some leviathan steam-driven establish- 

 ment Her Majesty's mail-coach, and Mr. Newman's neat 

 post-chaise attached to the Rail we can hardly hope that 

 agriculture alone will be able to maintain its old relations, 

 and to resist the economical pressure. 



