n.] DISTRIBUTION OF LAND IN ENGLAND. 



proprietors, properly so called, have existed. But I 

 would remark that the disappearance of the English 

 peasantry, "the divorce of the labourer from the 

 soil," as it has been termed, is not due to oppression, 

 but to prosperity. By the great fall in the value of 

 silver, which commenced in the fifteenth century, the 

 copyholder, who enjoyed by custom fixity of rent and 

 tenure, became, in fact, a proprietor of his allotment, 

 subject to some moderate burdens; and he therefore 

 generally ceased to be a tiller of the soil. Cultivation 

 came to be carried on universally by hired labourers, 

 employed by copyholders as well as by free- 

 holders. If injustice has been done in the course of 

 this great change, it has certainly not been exercised 

 by the owners of land on the peasantry, since a vast 

 part of the best lands, to which the former were 

 legally entitled, have become the property of the 

 latter, without any equivalent being given by them, 

 through the gradual operation of the causes to which 

 I have alluded. Without revolution, and almost im- 

 perceptibly, landlordism was virtually abolished over 

 at least one-fourth of the arable land of England. 

 The burdens and restrictions to which copyhold 

 lands remained subject, render them, no doubt, 

 somewhat less valuable than freeholds of the same 

 extent, but the difference is not generally of great 

 importance. 



