

LAND AS AN INVESTMENT FOR MONEY 161 



indeed any one road that would alow it. ... The whole land 

 raised and uneven, and full of stones, many of them very large, 

 of a hard iron quality, and all the ridges crooked in shape of an S, 

 and very high and full of noxious weeds, and poor, being worn out 

 by culture, without proper manure or tillage. . . . The people 

 poor, ignorant, and slothfull, and ingrained enimies to planting, 

 enclosing, or any improvements or cleanness/' 



Neither in Scotland nor in England were open-field farmers, or ^^ 

 tenants-at-will, or even leaseholders for lives, likely to initiate 

 changes in the cultivation of the soil. It was almost equally idle 

 to expect that small freeholders would attempt experiments on the 

 agricultural methods of their forefathers, which, in a single season, 

 might bring them to the verge of ruin. In both countries, it was . 

 the large landlords who took the lead in the agricultural revolution \f 

 of the eighteenth century, and the larger farmers who were the first /\ 

 to adopt improvements. Both classes found that land was the 

 most profitable investment for their capital. Their personal 

 motives were probably, in the main, self-interested, and a rise in 

 rental value or in the profits of their business was their reward. 

 But though philanthropy and farming make a fractious mixture, 

 the movement was of national value. When the sudden develop- 

 ment of manufacturing industries created new markets for food- 

 supplies, necessity demanded the conversion of the primitive self- 

 sufficing village-farms into factories of bread and meat. For more 

 than half a century the natural conservatism or caution of agri- 

 culturists resisted any extensive change. Down to 1760 the 

 pressure of a growing population was scarcely felt. Nor were the 

 commercial advantages of scientific husbandry so clearly established, 

 even in 1790, as to convince the bulk of English landlords of the 

 wisdom of adopting improved methods. ^^> 



The comparatively slow progress of the movement is illustrate^ 

 by the variations in the number of Enclosure Acts passed before 

 and after 1760. But it must always be remembered that an Act of 

 Parliament was not the only method of enclosure, and that counties 

 had been enclosed, either entirely or mainly, without their inter- 

 vention. In Tudor times open-field arable lands and common 

 pastures had been sometimes enclosed not only by agreement or 

 purchase, but by force or fraud. Sometimes they had been 

 extinguished, in whole or in part, by one individual freeholder, 

 who had bought up the strips of his partners. Sometimes, where / 



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