Ji Discourse on Agriculture. xxiii 



annual income from landed estate in England of 441i. 13s. af- 

 ter paying all direct taxes, will nett only 184J. 10s. Of these 

 taxes, or burthens, the tithe and poor rate are 180l. I In France, 

 all taxes (I presume direct taxes) paid, the same amount of 

 income would nett 3751. The otherwise insatiahle autocrat 

 of the French people, spared, to keep them in quiet, their 

 fields and their purses ; whilst he exhausted their population. 

 He fed their national pride with his all-consuming glory; 

 whilst he and his myrmidons fattened on the spoils of other 

 nations. Nor did we escape his indiscriminating grasp. True, 

 the agriculture of England is, in consequence of them, depress- 

 ed; but ours would entirely sink under no very great portion 

 of such burthens. Her population, including her European 

 dominions, scarcely doubles our own. Our resources arc 

 wonderfully fruitful, and our territory various and extensive. 

 And we have, perhaps, too little difficulty in thinning the 

 ranks of our population by settleing our waste lands ; whilst 

 she meets with obstacles, almost insuperable, in bringing in- 

 to profit her commone and wastes ; important to her, trifling 

 when compared with ours. Yet those commons and wastes 

 amount to 6,300,000 acres in England alone, (nearly a se- 

 venth part of the whole area of that kingdom,) and the great- 

 er part of them are capable of high cultivation. But it so 

 happens in human affairs, that apparent benefits often pro- 

 duce opposite consequences. Our boundles territory of waste 

 lands operates, frequently, as a bar to the improvement of 

 our old settlements, by affording a new and seductive scene 

 to the occupants of exhausted lands. Our forests are the 

 soonest brought into culture by our own people ; and they, in 

 great numbers, through fickelness and want of intelligence in 

 agriculture, prefer migrating, to renovating their old, and lo- 

 cally more valuable, lands. Europeans (with a few valuable 

 exceptions) do not succeed in our new settlements. And we 

 have been generally disappointed in our expectations from 

 them, of profitably increasing our agricultural population, 

 however estimable many of them may be in other omploy- 

 ments. So that the swarms for migration must abandon our 

 old hives. And in your volumes there are lessons for them. 



