xvi.] DISTRIBUTION OF LAND IN ENGLAND 67 



activity, whose malignant influence has inflicted per- 

 manent evils. It may be that the mischief is too 

 widespread for remedial measures. But no English- 

 man who has the courage to forecast the destinies of 

 his country can doubt that its greatest danger lies in 

 the present alienation of the people from the soil, 

 and in the future exodus of a discontented peasantry." l 



Although well accustomed to the somewhat ex- 

 aggerated terms which often characterise attacks on 

 the English law of real property, I had considerable 

 difficulty in discovering the particular mischief 

 floating in the mind of the author, against which 

 the above pathetic passage was directed. 



It is well known that strict settlements of land 

 were, as I have shown above, introduced more than 

 a century before the Restoration, and could not, 

 therefore, have been, as supposed by the writer, the 

 invention of lawyers of that period ; and as the evil 

 results which moved his indignation manifested 

 themselves, according to his statement, only through 

 the malignant influence of such lawyers, it can- 

 not be supposed that strict settlements produced 

 these evils. As to the mode in which strict settle- 

 ments prevented the labourer from obtaining land 

 (the effect which the author attributes to them), he is 

 entirely silent. He simply assumes the fact. Does 

 he wish it to be understood that the labourer could 



1 History of Agriculture and Prices in England, by James 

 E. Thorold Kogers, M.A. Oxford, vol. i. p. 693. 



F 2 



