88 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



He wants a man to please him and to fall in with his own 

 views. For security he has his landlord's distress. I know 

 a landlord — landlord in two counties — who is otherwise 

 a most estimable and liberal-minded man, but who takes 

 credit for it that he never will accept a Dissenter as a tenant. 

 His tenants are all Churchmen. I knew a great landlord, 

 a noble marquess, now dead, who would not have a tenant 

 who did not vote his own way in politics. There may be men 

 on the other side of the party line who are equally intoler- 

 ant. There may be blue ribbon landlords who will not have 

 a tenant who will not take the pledge. Now, what has all 

 this to do with good or bad farming ? And how does it 

 represent the interest of the Nation, which looks for the 

 production of food ? A Dissenter's five quarters of wheat 

 will be worth more to the Nation than a Churchman's three 

 ■ — be he ever so orthodox. A red ribbon man's good farm- 

 ing will be worth more to it than a blue ribbon man's bad 

 — be he ever so temperate. The thing shows how very far 

 our accepted land system has forced the regulation of national 

 Agriculture away from its true lines, allowed that which 

 is really a trusteeship for the Nation to degenerate into 

 irresponsible patronage, to please private fancy. The evil 

 is aggravated by the fact that so very much of our Agri- 

 culture is small. Not the small Agriculture of the small 

 holder, which distinctly stimulates intellect and energy ; 

 but the small Agriculture of the tenant, say, of 50 or 200 

 acres, which acreage under ordinary circumstances will not 

 suffice for a man of such position as would suggest superior 

 education and refined power of mind, a man with business 

 ambition and sufficient capital to permit him to give scope 

 to it. We have excellent farmers upon our land, men 

 whose example ought so to influence our Agriculture as 

 to raise it to the highest possible level. Unfortunately 

 amid the torpor and routine-bound inertia surrounding 

 them, their splendid leaven will not work. But these men 

 are for the most part farmers of the larger sort, men with 

 sufficient capital, and occupying a position, which enables 

 them to meet their landlord on terms of equality and bar- 

 gain freely with him. And these men in truth form a class 



