CONCLUSION. 269 



of this rich country exhibits. It is almost vain to 

 argue against & feeling. Once make the cultivators 

 of the soil of a country/^/, as a body, that in the 

 soil itself they have really no interest beyond its 

 annual produce, and you poison agriculture at its 

 source. Shallow draining, shallow cultivation, 

 shallow reckonings, and shallow knowledge of his 

 business, are not naturally inherent in a man, 

 because he is a "Tenant-farmer;" but in a country 

 where the law reigns happily supreme, erroneous 

 laws applied to the land, make it come to appear 

 BO. And this has been the case with us ; and that 

 in two ways, first by the enormous and factitious 

 expense of legal proceedings, pressing with every 

 form of costliness, and ingenuity of iucumbrance 

 upon the soil, saddling every landed estate, in ad- 

 dition to the owner, the clergyman, the tenant, the 

 laborer, the poor, with the maintenance of its Law- 

 yer, and secondly by refusing to the vendor and 

 purchaser, that last resource of inherited penury 

 and embarrassed ownership, a free, speedy, and in- 

 expensive mode of Transfer. The periodical ran- 

 sacking which the musty muniments of a*n intermin- 

 able " Title" undergo to enable a few acres of land to 

 change hands ; to say nothing of those monotonous 

 occasions, death and marriage, or the complete 



