Agricultural Statistics. 
569 
liability to change arising from causes quite distinct from 
the exyiration of a term, the thing which makes calculation 
upon a Scotch farm so much more businesslike than upon an 
English one, and changes altogether the sensations with which the 
tenant receives his landlord's congratulations upon the abundance 
of his crops and the improvement of his land. p]xamine it as 
we may, this lies at the root of the question ; and it is difficult 
to see how, in the fair spirit of bargain between man and man, 
any occupier can be required to deliver up a statement of the im- 
proved returns of his farm unless he has sufficient security that 
the disclosure will not be turned against himself and those to 
whose support his skill and labour are primarily and naturally 
devoted. We are far from suggesting such grounds of apology 
for the reluctance to communicate the information required where 
no just cause for this apprehension exists, but we deprecate an 
inconsiderate contrast like that commonly heard between Mr. Hall 
Maxwell's happy latter experience in Scotland, Avith that of Sir 
John Walsham and the other gentlemen engaged with him in 
England. It is fair that an obvious and fundamental difference 
of circumstances, if it exist, should be pointed out and taken 
into the question ; and it will be no new phenomenon in the 
occult relation of things if it be found that there is a natural 
connexion between long Leases and perfect Statistics. 
There is a secret interdependence which links together things 
outwardly separate by an inner chain of practical truth, which 
may be found by those who will look for it, in agriculture and 
the relations of the soil, as well as elsewhere throughout a con- 
sistent creation : it is an excellent arguer, for its ultimate appeal 
is generally to men's self-interest in its broadest and most en- 
lightened form. It antiquates erroneous systems underneath the 
very eyes of their apologists : before they have exhausted half the 
laudo jnanmtem" arguments, the very subject of their defence 
is gone. The surest intimation of its presence, and charac- 
teristic agency, is felt at that moment when men try to fasten a 
good thing on to a bad one, to make a true system work in the 
socket of a false one. Statistics (though pre-eminently the busi- 
ness and duty of a government to superintend) are a branch of 
' useful knowledge ' wont to spring of its own accord from the very 
life sap of a self-supporting and healthy business : like the well- 
known ' governor ' of the steam-engine they should form a part of, 
and be set In motion by, the very tiling they are required to regulate. 
To be beholden to Government for their suggestion and establish- 
ment, may indeed be objectionable, but the objection lies against 
the machine that failed to generate them of itself, and on its own 
account. The farmer who refuses his aid, or rather his item, to 
their collection, for the direction and benefit of his brother agri- 
