286 
Agriculture of Denmark. 
of their Icaseliolds. On all crown-lands such property has been 
sold to them, and many landed proprietors seem inclined to 
follow the example. Moreover, an attempt has of late years been 
made in the Danish Diet to pass a law compelling owners of 
estates to sell their leasehold tenements to the tenants in posses- 
sion, at a price to be fixed by a commission appointed for the 
purpose, less the value of the fine (Indfii'stning) paid, in propor- 
tion to the unexpired term of the lease. The arguments of the 
friends of the yeomen lessees are to the effect that the landlords 
are in reality not the sole proprietors of these leasehold tene- 
ments, because by law they are deprived of the power to dispose 
of them, but that each lessee has, in accordance with certain 
old, very obscure, and ambiguous legal enactments, a certain 
claim on them as part proprietors ; they further argue that the 
constitution of 1849 (which enacts that expropriation can take 
place when the public weal requires it) justifies expropriation in 
this instance. 
The supporters of the landed proprietors insist that public 
interest (as the framers of the constitution understood it) has. 
nothing to do with the question at issue, and that the para- 
graph in the constitution cited is only applicable to pro- 
perty situated in localities required for purposes of public con- 
venience ; they demand that landlords shall be at liberty tO' 
continue the present system, with the option to sell or add such 
property to their manors when leases expire. In all probability 
this leasehold system will, in the course of some years, be 
abolished by voluntary sale to tenants, without recourse to so 
unjust an act as that which would by law compel landlords to 
sell their properties : the present proprietors have obtained pos- 
session of them by purchase or inheritance, whatever their an- 
cestors may have done, and the holders of the leases in modern 
days have voluntarily entered into the relations they now com- 
plain of. No doubt earlier their condition was wretched, but 
now their personal and political liberty is as great as that of 
other classes. To benefit them further, at the expense of the 
large landed proprietors, appears as undesirable as it would be, 
unjust. 
The Rural Population of the Danish Monarchy is 
divisible into three great classes, viz., the nobility and large 
landed proprietors, the yeomen who are jiroprietors or lease- 
holders, and the labourers. 
The Estates of the Nobility of the kingdom, though they 
form a separate division, do not at present retain any of these 
especial privileges, which, in earlier time, were very great. They 
owe their origin to King Christian Y., who in 1671 created the 
