CONCLUSION. 261 



experience of a land-owner occupying the most 

 difficult of his own farms, and striving to " sound 

 the bass string" of the matter, by assuming the 

 actual circumstance and position of one of those 

 whose interests it was his duty to study and under- 

 stand, shall be stated, with such reflection as most 

 suggests itself to one who, while his spare shelves 

 were filling with " Agricultural Journals," and the 

 works of Tail, Mills, Liebig, Johnstone, and others 

 " of that ilk," still kept an eye upon his law-books.* 



* Our accomplished lawyer, as well as instructive and 

 interesting author, here gives us the very gist of the duties 

 of a large landholder and true agriculturist. Not as usually 

 understood in the United States the farming out his acres 

 in such a way as to grind the utmost dollar out of an ignorant 

 and impoverished tenantry, and the tenantry in turn grinding 

 the scanty substance out of the continually exhausting soil ; 

 but duties as they should be : to examine the actual condition 

 of his lands in the constitution of their soil, their applica- 

 bility to certain varieties of crops, the best modes of their 

 cultivation, and the expenditure of the necessary amount of 

 capital thereon in short, their improvement throughout, in 

 the best and most profitable manner. So long as the propri- 

 etor of farming lands sets himself up on a higher, unsympa- 

 thizing, downward-looking position, than they who draw their 

 subsistence from his acres ; scorns to investigate the subjects 

 appertaining to his own resources, and the consequent welfare 



