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CHAPTER XIII. 



THE BIETH OF THE LAXD LAWS. 



So far our history has been the diagnosis of a country's travail. 

 The pangs caused by no less than five invasions preceded the 

 birth of a mighty nation. Such interior disorders as arose 

 subsequently in class struggles betwixt king and baron ; par- 

 tisan belligerency like the Wars of the Roses ; or the bitter 

 religious conflicts of Reformation days, were but the usual 

 infantile ailments of a vigorous babyhood ; and the young 

 nation waxed all the stronger, when at length surrounded by 

 the gentler atmosphere of peaceful pursuits, because it had 

 been well hardened by an early nurture amidst the turmoil of 

 constant battle. We have, then, arrived at a period when we 

 can distinguish the encouraging cries of the ploughman to his 

 oxen from the battle shouts of angry combatants and the wails 

 of the widow and orphan. Sweet strains of poetry, learned 

 theses of science, and far-reaching schemes of statecraft begin to 

 flow from the clerkly pens of Englishmen whose fathers' hands 

 had learned but to grasp the sword. 



Henceforth the science of agriculture assumes a considerable 

 importance in the economy of the English Landed Interest. 

 It had long done so in other countries where the Teutonic in- 

 fluence had failed to penetrate or exist. As early as the 10th 

 century, Spain, under Saracenic auspices, was the seat of an 

 advanced husbandry, which filled her treasury Avith an annual 

 revenue exceeding £6,000,000 sterling. For works of irriga- 

 tion and agricultural improvements of heroic proportions, we 

 have only to trace the same country's handiwork in Peru, 

 where the penguin, for the sake of its guano, was as sacred to 



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