CONCLUSION. 235 



cumstance, would voluntarily choose. It needed no 

 small ingenuity of folly, no small 'method in our 

 madness ' to produce that timidity and reluctance of 

 investment in the soil which the disposable capital of 

 this rich country exhibits. It is almost vain to argue 

 against a feeling. Once make the cultivators of the 

 soil feel, as a body, that in the Land itself they have 

 really no interest beyond its annual produce, and you 

 poison agriculture at its source. Shallow draining, 

 shallow cultivation, shallow reckonings, and shallow 

 knowledge of his business, are not naturally inherent 

 in a man because he is a 'Tenant-farmer:' but in a 

 country where the law (as happily with us,) reigns 

 supreme, an erroneous law applied to the land may 

 by degrees really make it come to appear so. And 

 this has been the case with us : first by the incessant 

 recurrence of law expenses which our system involves, 

 pressing with every form of costliness, upon the soil, 

 saddling every landed estate, in addition to the owner, 

 the clergyman, the tenant, the labourer, and the poor, 

 with the maintenance of its Lawyer, and secondly 

 by denying that last resource of inherited penury and 

 embarrassed ownership, a free, speedy, and inexpensive 

 mode of Transfer. The periodical ransacking which 

 the musty muniments of an interminable ' Title ' un- 



