248 AGRICULTURE. 



which a benevolent gentleman has devoted a field of the 

 finest old turf to labourers' gardens. The produce has been 

 enormous, the admiration of every one, has gone the round 

 of the papers. It would have been just the same with the 

 plough, but gentlemen vigilantly guard their very fine 

 old turf from the plough. We know several instances in 

 which ordinary land, devoted to labourers' gardens, has di- 

 minished year by year in produce, and in which the number 

 of deserted plots has year by year increased. We do not 

 at all deny or doubt that the occupation of a piece of spade- 

 husbandry land is an alleviation to a man who cannot get 

 work ; nor do we deny or doubt that an inducement to pick 

 and scrape the roads very often prevents waste. We have 

 seen instances in which a labouring man has been tolerated 

 in taking possession of twenty or thirty perches of a very 

 poor waste, and by picking and scraping has manured it up 

 to a very considerable produce ; perhaps, if a value were 

 placed on his own time and on his children's, at considerable 

 cost. But the sight is gratifying: a man has acquired an 

 object endeared to him by honest industry, and has taken 

 a step on the road to independence. When moral good 

 has been created, we do not strictly scrutinize the econo- 

 mical results. But all this is very different from employing 

 spade-husbandry as a remedy for agricultural pressure. 

 Spade-husbandry created the Irish paupers, but it very 

 soon left us to maintain them. 



In a work to which we have already alluded, Mr. 

 Johnston, whose general tone and reflections will, we have 

 no doubt, receive the sympathetic approval of a large body 

 of readers, intimates that, recently, in the Qua>terly 

 Review, we have spoken with unbecoming coolness of the 

 future prospects of agriculture. The coolness must have 

 been of manner ; it could not have been of feeling, for it 

 would be difficult to find a person more completely bound 

 up with agriculture, by habit, by taste, and by interest, 

 than ourselves. We might have expressed regrets which 

 would have been sincere, but which would also have beeu 



