90 
Account of Shepherds Corner Farm. 
the system there apphed and the plans adopted in the other fields, 
must be in great part set down to the want of experience in 
similar works, and specially to the expense of digging, which my 
desire to relieve the wants of the poor led me to adopt. If all 
this land had been treated as No. 6 was managed, a tenant might 
have paid a rent and received a fair profit, but the labourer 
would not have received the same amount of benefit that was con- 
ferred upon him ; and in all similar operations proposed to be 
carried on by a tenant this preliminary question must be settled: 
" Is it the object of the work to employ and benefit the labourers, 
and ultimately the occupier and owner ; or is it intended to look 
chiefly to the profits of the owner and occupier ?" and according 
to the reply must the terms be adjusted. In the progress of the 
improvement I have been obliged to try various modes of cultiva- 
tion, which now apjiear to have been wrong and to have lessened 
my profit as a farmer, but they were adopted as safeguards against 
greater loss. I have occupied the land throughout a period of 
great alternation in prices of farm produce and of great variety of 
seasons, and I have experienced the losses attendant on the in- 
juries of insects, rabbits, and of various accidental circumstances. 
I purpose letting the land at Michaelmas next; and after estimat- 
ing the crops which will be mine before that time, according to 
the present prospect, and looking at the balance of the account up 
to Michaelmas, 1842, I am satisfied that as a tenant I have in- 
curred no loss, though I have made no adequate profit ; but as a 
landlord I have made a farm of the value of the surrounding 
arable lands out of a comparative waste, at no absolute loss to 
myself, although, at the time of the commencement and at periods 
during the progress of the work, my neighbours, who watched my 
work as well as myself, who regulated the proceeding, regarded 
the undertaking as likely to be a failure as a farming speculation, 
and therefore only good for the labourers who lived by the em- 
ployment. My experience, during the fifteen years which this 
work has occupied, of the difficulties and expenses which attend 
the improvement of uncultivated land, has satisfied me that no 
tenant could have, in justice to himself, undertaken such a work 
on the terms Avhich a surveyor would have offered on the usual 
calculations ; and I am of opinion that before a landlord urges or 
advises his tenant " to cultivate and improve,'' he should give to 
the tenant a firm tenure by lease for a lengthened term, and that 
the most sure mode of doing justice to both parties at the end of 
such term would be to ascertain and enter in the lease the average 
produce of the land at the time of entry, so that, at the expiration 
of the term, he may be able, having compared the difference in 
the productive powers of the land at the commencement and the 
