66 AGRICULTURE IN THE 



It is instructive to see the beginning of that rapacity which 

 has deterred the tenant from making improvements, lest he 

 should have to pay on his own outlay, a rapacity which has 

 done more to hinder the growth of agriculture as opposed to 

 stock breeding than any other cause, which has made good 

 husbandry in England the accident of the farmer's occupation, 

 and has checked innumerable improvements ; and also the 

 beginning of that distrust and negligence which has at last, 

 after the occurrence of a few unpropitious seasons, involved 

 tenant and landlord in a common ruin. That English agri- 

 culture was stimulated, though in an unhealthy direction, by 

 the existence of laws prohibiting the importation of foreign 

 corn, except under conditions which it was all but impossible 

 to foresee, is I think indisputable ; but it is also clear that the 

 mischief was to some extent obviated by the remarkable pro- 

 gress which the English husbandman made in the selection and 

 growth of stock, that portion of his property which the land- 

 owner could not lay his clutches on. It is a question of the 

 profoundest interest, under the conditions of free competition, 

 of those expedients which practically lessen distance by con- 

 tinually lowering the cost of products, and of the freedom from 

 such restraints as are imposed on occupation and husbandry 

 in the supposed interests of a territorial aristocracy, whether 

 English agriculture must not permanently decline, or the public 

 good must not be consulted by sweeping away a number of 

 untenable and mischievous customs, and abolishing a host of 

 disastrous and demoralising privileges. Fitzherbert gives us 

 an early instance of the mischief which followed from the 

 absence of protection for the tenant's permanent improvements, 

 though no doubt the practice of the landowner was justified, 

 three centuries and a half ago, by the plea that to protect the 

 property of the tenant was to impair the landlord's freedom of 

 contract. There are some kinds of sophistry which it seems 



was from 75. to 35. an acre. It seems that the rate was about a hundred cart loads to 

 the acre. The highest amount must have been nearly equal in value to the fee simple 

 of the land. 



