144 History of the English Landed Interest. 



would be glad of any excuse to swell the ranks of those 

 opposed to the new system. On the whole, Young handles his 

 subject with considerable ingenuity. The " mercantilist " had 

 drawn a picture of the case as it was before the Act of 

 Enclosure ; the " agriculturist" determines to contrast it with 

 the case after the enforcement of this measure. The wild 

 Yorkshire moorland ^ has never hitherto had a shilling of its 

 absent landlord's capital expended upon it. So far it has been 

 a wilderness, whose stillness had been broken only by the 

 bleating of sheep. Suddenly it becomes the centre of a busy 

 crowd. Besides the husbandmen employed in its reclamation, 

 vast numbers of poor people are engaged in hedging, ditching, 

 and planting, in building barns, of&ces, and houses, and in 

 fabricating all the various implements of husbandry. By 

 means of tillage, marling, and liming, crops of barley, rye, and 

 turnips (Young ignores here his preference for crops affording 

 direct human food) are made to realise far larger profits per 

 acre than the wool, and fields temporarily seeded down with 

 clover and rye grass sustain three times the quantity of sheep 

 to the acre that the wild grass of the original waste did. The 

 old people and children, deprived of their livelihood in the 

 wool factory, find more healthy employment in weeding wheat, 

 pickling seed-corn, " frighting " of vermin, planting peas and 

 beans, slicing and dropping potato setts, etc., etc. 



Let us, then, briefly recapitulate the views of Young's school 

 of economy. They realised that the origin of all wealth is 

 the soil, but forgot that its produce is not per se such until 

 it becomes a marketable commodity. They, therefore, would 

 have had the State refuse any encouragement whatever to 

 manufacturers so long as some millions of waste acres remained 

 to be converted into arable farms. But in their antagonism 

 to commerce they drew a distinction between those industries 

 confined to the manufacture of native productions and those 

 relating to materials introduced from abroad. With the latter 

 Young had no patience whatever, pointing out that, as his 

 friend the Canon of Windsor had said, products raised from 



^ He was a competent judge in this part of the argument, having lately 

 taken the tenancy of and tried to reclaim a Yorkshire waste. 



