CONCLUSION. 243 



that timidity and reluctance of investment in the soil 

 which the disposable capital of this rich country ex- 

 hibits. It is almost vain to argue against a feeling. 

 Once make the cultivators of the soil/ee/, 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 erro- 

 neous 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 ex- 

 penses 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 mainte- 

 nance 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' undergo to 

 enable a few acres of land to change hands ; to say 

 nothing of those momentous occasions, death and 



