The Making of the Land in England. 
365 
the further demand on the resources of those who have carried 
them out, in order that their efficiency should not be impaired, 
will have to be considered. This efficiency is maintained by 
renewals — renewals of operations and improvements which it is 
too much the custom to regard as permanent, when no such 
thing as permanency has been achieved. The life of these 
improvements is not perpetual, that of some is actually transient. 
If the primary operation, such as grubbing and levelling, be 
excepted, which once done may be said to be done for ever, 
there is not one that does not become from the date of its com- 
pletion the source of anxiety in order to its protection and pre- 
servation, and of consequent further expenditure of capital. 
The first execution of such works has all the charm of con- 
quest surrounding it — it is greeted with the applause of admiring 
citizens, the successes are tabulated and advertised, the failures 
are never mentioned. While the field laughs with grain, it is 
more than possible that the owner groans at the cost of its 
artificial fertility, and finds too late that high farming is not 
the remedy for lowering prices. Too often he must feel it 
would have been better to have left the down unbroken, the 
copse ungrubbed, the gorse and heather to bloom in peace, the 
sullen clay undrained, the boulders where they lay on the 
moor, and the grand homestead in the architect's office. The 
mention of an inspector or commissioner sends the same sort of 
cold thrill through him as such references would among the 
criminal classes, and he curses the day when modern legislation 
enabled him through such agencies to burden his acres with 
debt, and to excite at the same time the cupidity of the ignorant 
and unscrupulous theorists who would appropriate what shadow 
of net income might remain to him, under a claim on behalf of 
the nation to the " natural increment of value." In such cases — 
and there are thousands of them — there is, instead of any natural 
increment of value, an artificial depletion of income. 
As far as our experience reaches, the efficiency of modern 
under-drains cannot be counted on beyond a term of fifty years : 
in very many cases renewal has been found necessary at the end 
of thirty, either from the decay of the material used, as straw, turf, 
or wood, the defective design of the drain tile, as was the case 
in the old horseshoe tile, or the small diameter of the pipe, the 
inroads of moles, the entrance of roots, or deposit of silt and 
mud. Sometimes a zeal for universal deep work in soapy clays 
has ended in a suffiication of the passage, and caused an early 
substitution of shallower channels ; sometimes the burial at the 
bottom of broken stones with pipes placed on their top, some- 
times the direction in which the drains were set out, frequently 
the distances allowed between them, have speedily terminated 
