356 
The Making of the Land in England. 
landowners enjoy : rather it seems a most suitable season for 
inquiry, not of a political but of a practical kind, into the 
causes of the modern value, so as to ascertain whether or no 
it really depends upon the extraneous influence of the sur- 
rounding capital and labour of an industrious and populous 
society. No doubt such an influence is in operation, and has 
in some instances an appreciable effect ; but the case of the land- 
owner and agriculturist is, that in purely rural districts this 
modern value can be directly traced to the expenditure for years 
of energy and money on the subject-matter itself by its owners, 
the capital sum of which when taken into account may possibly 
be found to exceed the market-value of the estates on which it 
has been expended. 
This view of the case is put forth and supported by a dis- 
tinguished American writer,* who seems to have anticipated, in 
the assertion of this claim on behalf of the State, a serious check 
to the employment of private labour and capital in the subjuga- 
tion of the prairie and the forest by those whose title to such 
land is based on a patent from the Federal Government, coupled 
with industrial occupation. 
We in England are at the present day but the heirs or 
successors to others, who, whether they derived their original 
title in the wilderness and waste by patent, grant, conquest, 
diplomacy, or communal inheritance, generally got nothing, 
apart from wild animals and minerals, for the expenditure of 
toil and capital in the development of their acquisition but the 
chance of remuneration. Any one who will look, for instance, 
into the history of the " making of the land" in the great level 
of the fens in the time of the Stuarts, will learn that the chance 
of remuneration was then anything but a good one for the 
adventurers and pioneers on those great and useful works. 
Some of us have been eye-witnesses of the nature and extent 
of the warfare of human industry against natural obstacles in 
the New World, of which Great Britain in recent years has 
furnished only occasional examples. Possibly ninety-nine out of 
every hundred of the present inhabitants of England can form- 
no conception of the character and severity of this struggle, 
and it may not be out of place to reproduce a picture of it as 
drawn by De Tocqueville from personal observation. He 
says : — 
"The bells round the necks of the cattle announced our approach to a 
* clearinp; ' when we were yet a long way off, and we soon afterwan^s heard 
the stroke of the hatchet hewinf; down the trees of the forest. As we came 
nearer, traces of destruction marked the presence of civilised man ; the road 
* Professor Sumner of Yale College. 
