22 
Arthur Young. 
testimony in our time. Estates were being given away rather 
than sold, and the metayers were so miserably poor it was im- 
possible for them to cultivate well. He says he could have 
spent a month in the Bouvbonnois looking at estates to be sold. 
He heard there were G,000 under offer in France, and then avows 
his love of a policy that inspires such confidence as to give value 
to land, and renders men so comfortable on their estates as to 
make the sale of them the last of their ideas. He had serious 
thoughts of settling in France in order to farm there, but appre- 
hended he might be purchasing a share in a civil war, and his 
ardent hopes were damped by a valuable land tax, and a pro- 
hibition of the export of wool. He visited the once residence of 
Olivir de Serres, the great parent of French agriculture, with 
that sort of veneration which those only can feel who have 
addicted themselves strongly to some predominant pursuit, and 
find it in such moments indulged in its most exquisite feelings. 
Two hundred years after his exertions, let me ” (he says) “ do 
honour to his memory.” ( Travels , vol. i. p. 183, ed. 1794.) 
With these passages reference to the agricultural writings 
of Arthur Young must close. A few remarks, however, on his 
views as a political economist (though again partly a transcrip- 
tion) should be added. They seem, whenever cheap benevolence 
and easy concession to noisy clamour are the fashion, to be of 
special value and importance. Strength, Young says, depends 
on nourishment, and a Government is rotten that strikes a palsy 
into all the lower and productive classes to favour those whose 
only merit is consumption. He adds that the wisest dispensa- 
tion of money among the poor, not earned by industry, always 
creates a dependence, and consequently becomes in such a pro- 
portion the origin of the evil that is to be cured. For the like 
reason he considers hospitals are equal nuisances ; they are at- 
tended by a similar effect, and he declared the amount of human 
wretchedness in England to be quadrupled by the expenditure 
of the poor-rate. 
On questions of home or international trade, on commerce, 
on monopolies, on religious bigotry, on class arrogance or igno- 
rance, on endowed charities, on the law of settlement, on taxa- 
tion direct or indirect, on bounties and drawbacks, be seems to 
have reached truths not so much by slow reasoning as by 
flashes of instinct. He is never pedantic or pompous ; his sen- 
tences are full of vigour, and follow each other page after page 
in the most natural manner imaginable. Though best known 
by repute as an agriculturist, he spent much of his active life, 
at home and abroad, as an intimate with men of genius and 
position, who valued his society and understood his ability; and, 
