FORTESCUE'S ENGLAND. 749 



As far as the yeomen and husbandmen were concerned, 

 there is no reason to doubt that their condition remained as 

 fortunate in the sixteenth as the contemporary witness of 

 their prosperity asserts that it was in the fifteenth. A rise 

 in the price of agricultural produce, unless it be the result of 

 moderately bad seasons, is always advantageous to those who 

 are tilling land, whether it comes from a change in the value 

 of money, or from an increased demand, or from a greatly 

 deficient supply. Rent can only be increased by the growth 

 of population in countries which are as yet sparsely occupied, 

 though in such countries there is a violent contrast between 

 the rent of fully settled districts and those which are scantily 

 inhabited, as is seen in various parts of the old states in the 

 American Union, or by the development and diffusion of 

 agricultural improvements. Now England in the time of the 

 Plantagenet and Tudor sovereigns was as fully peopled as it 

 could be, for the produce of the country was only adequate to 

 the comfortable maintenance of a population which had always 

 hitherto demanded and obtained an ample and nourishing 

 diet. Improvements in the arts of agriculture, as I have often 

 said, had not yet been developed, and until the skill which 

 appropriated and used them had become the common property 

 of all agriculturists, and the habits of farming capital had 

 become migratory, there were no means by which the land- 

 owner could bring his tenants under the influence of competi- 

 tion rents. This was to be effected in the future; it could not 

 be achieved as yet. The student of agricultural history, and 

 especially of that phenomenon in it, the rise of agricultural rents 

 a hundredfold over ancient rates, will find that what econo- 

 mists call fertility, is not only that of the earth and the sun, 

 but of that acuteness, skill, foresight, and diligence which con- 

 stitute the best qualities of a competent husbandman in our 

 day. Fertility is and must be in the soil, but it is still more 

 in the intelligence of the man who handles the soil. The 

 former kind of fertility is, and may remain, a capacity only; the 

 latter is an energy. 



