of Edinburgh, Session 1882-83. 
115 
is ini2:)ossible for the real student to recognise or admit, still we 
must bear in mind that those feelings and sentiments which affect 
the relation of man to his mother earth are deep enough to permit 
the roots of society to sink into them far below the stage on which 
the prominent drama of history is enacted ; that relation underlies 
the very framework of society itself, and systems which have 
regulated the relation of man to the earth which bears him and 
feeds him continue to exercise a powerful influence over his imagina- 
tion and feelings long after they have ceased to operate on the actual 
circumstances of his outward life. Nor from the analogy of other 
sciences need we be surprised if this recent stirring of these substrata 
of our early society gives birth to strange efforts to revert to ancient 
types; these efforts are no doubt due rather to individual eccen- 
tricity than to general conviction, just as in nature we find occasional 
specimens of highly developed species which exhibit a sportive in- 
clination to revert to primeval types from which lengthened cultiva- 
tion has really far removed the whole class to which they belong. 
There are, however, not a few side lights which the fitful gleams 
we get in studying these ancient types of society may throw into the 
origin and pristine circumstances of those relations which subsist 
in our own day. For instance, the theory of rent most acceptable 
to modern economy and most consonant with modern circumstances 
is that which represents the rent as the share falling to the land- 
owner of the profits of a quasi-partnership, to the capital of 
which the owner contributes his land and the tenant his stock, his 
labour, and his skill. Very ancient types of society justify this 
theory, and in many parts of Europe more subject to Latin influ- 
ences than we have been it survives in the metayer systems which 
prevail ; but it is on the whole a modern development, and bears 
abundant evidence of its origin in a state of society much more 
cultivated than any of those we have been considering. The rent of 
our ancient tenures was originally in the main personal service, and 
even when it began to assume the form of money payment it was 
a pecuniary substitution for such services or for that direct mainten- 
ance in bed and board which the king or the chief exacted ; and it 
was always fixed and definite, bearing no necessary relation to the 
value of the land. The foundation of our ancient relation between 
landlord and tenant was not, I apprehend, partnership but sale ; a 
tenant did not share the produce with his landlord, he bought the 
