The Land and the Community. 151 



had just directed the attention of his countrymen to the sub- 

 ject ; and the work ^ in which he denounced those vast domains 

 "given over" (so he said) to tenants at will, or to indolent 

 stewards charged with furnishing the means of dissipation and 

 luxury to their owners, passing their lives in towns, and too 

 proud to look after their estates, was so popular that it went 

 through five editions in as many ^'■ears.^ He declared that the 

 territory of a country could never be too much broken up, that 

 its subdivision gave vitality to a State ; and he instanced his 

 personal experiences in having, by dividing a large field into 

 several allotments, not only doubled his own rents, but made the 

 peasant proprietors independent. This was classical ground, 

 such an idea being in keeping with the best traditions of Roman 

 and Grecian land tenure, and it was also quite in accordance 

 with the philosophical and political tendencies of the age. ■ 

 Thus Arthur Young had said, " Give a man the secure posses- 

 sion of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden ; give 

 him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will turn it into 

 a desert." ^ " The magic of property," he points out during 

 his walk to Rosendal (^near Dunkirk), " will turn sand into 

 gold." " Leaving Suave," he says on another page, " I was 

 much struck with a large tract of land, seemingly nothing but 

 huge rocks, yet most of it enclosed and planted with the most 

 industrious attention. Every man has an olive, a mulberry, 

 an almond, or a peach tree ; and vines scattered among them, 

 so that the whole ground is covered with the oddest mixture 

 of these plants and bulging rocks that can be conceived. The 

 inhabitants of the village deserve encouragement for their 

 industry ; and if I were a French minister, they should have it. 

 They would soon turn all the deserts around them into gardens. 

 Such a knot of active husbandmen, who turn their rocks into 

 scenes of fertility {because, I suppose, their own), would do 

 the same by the wastes if animated by the same omnipotent 

 principle." 



* The. Friend of Man, vol. i. chap. v. p. 80, 4th Edit. 

 ^ Large and Small Farms, and their Influence on the Social Economy, 

 H. Passy, 1847. 



^ Tour through France, A. Young. 



