322 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CHAP. 



Yet in the same country and under the same laws, 

 wherever fixity of tenure or peasant properties exist, the 

 utmost prosperity prevails. Again, let us hear M. de 

 Laveleye : 



' ' I know of no more striking lesson in political economy than is 

 taught at Capri. Whence come the perfection of cultivation and the 

 comfort of the population 'I Certainly not from the fertility of the 

 soil, which is an arid rock. . . . Before obtaining the crops, it was 

 necessary, so to speak, to create the soil. It is the magic of owner- 

 ship which has produced this prodigy." 



Now let us come back to our own country, where we 

 shall find that exactly similar results are produced by 

 similar causes. On the Annandale Estate in Dumfriesshire, 

 plots of from two to six acres were granted to labourers on 

 a lease of twenty-one years. They built their own cottages, 

 having timber and stone supplied by the landlord, and 

 these little farms' were all cultivated by the labourer's 

 family, and in his own spare hours. Now note the result. 

 Among these peasant- farmers pauperism soon ceased to 

 exist, and it was especially noticed that habits of 

 marketing, and the constant demands on thrift and fore- 

 thought brought out new powers and virtues in the wives. 

 In fact, the moral effects of the system in fostering 

 industry, sobriety, and contentment, were described as no 

 less satisfactory than its economical success. 



Again, on Lord Tollemache's estate in Cheshire, plots of 

 land from two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half acres are let 

 with each cottage at an ordinary farm rent, and the results 

 have been eminentlybeneficial. It is remarked here too that 

 the habits of thrift and forethought encouraged by cow- 

 keeping and dairying, on however small a scale, constitute 

 a moral advantage of great importance. 



One more example must be given to show that even in 

 Ireland the laws of human nature do act the same as else- 

 where. Mr. Jonathan Pirn, in his Condition and Prospects 

 of Ireland, gives an account of how the rugged, bleak, and 

 sterile mountain of Forth, in Wexford, is sprinkled with 

 little patches of land, many of them on the highest part of 

 the mountain, reclaimed and enclosed at a vast expense of 

 labour by the peasant-proprietors, who have been induced 



