July 20. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
305 
The number of proprietors lias been constantly diminishing, 
and the land is passing into fewer and fewer hands. If the 
process were to continue, a time might come when the very 
stability of the State itself might be endangered, and a 
change of system would be imperatively required for the 
safety of the nation. Already many parts of the country are 
both materially and martially much weaker than at any 
former period. They can neither turn out the. same amount 
of food for the support of the nation, nor the same number 
of men for the national labour or the national defence. In 
other districts where the population is dense, the stature of 
the people has diminished,—that is, the people are under¬ 
going a course of physical deterioration. Great numbers of 
our healthiest, strongest, and most athletic sons are emi¬ 
grating; for it is no longer the half-starved pauper who 
emigrates, but the very pick of our industrial classes. The 
nation, powerful as it is, and perhaps presuming a little too 
much on its past career, is certainly at the present time 
undergoing a process of debilitation—becoming relatively 
weaker,—increasing in wealth, but not improving, or even 
maintaining, the solid element of a well-arranged and well- 
conditioned population. 
To arrest the progress of this growing evil, various 
remedies have been proposed. Some have asserted that a 
total abolition of entails would eli'ectually prevent the accu¬ 
mulation of estates into the hands of a single proprietor,— 
forgetting that the estates have been so accumulated simply 
because the large estates were entailed, and the small 
estates were not entailed; and that the usual purchaser, 
whenever land is exposed for sale, is either a great pro¬ 
prietor, or a great capitalist. When an evil has grown to a 
certain point, it will perpetuate itself, like iron, which, when 
heated to a certain temperature, will burn of its own accord. 
In the present condition of Britain, the abolilion of entails 
would be quite as likely to throw the land into fewer hands 
as to increase the number of landholders, because the great 
proprietors, who have large revenues, or almost unlimited 
credit, will give more for the land than its actual mercantile 
worth estimated by the rate of interest that might bo derived 
from other investments. The abolition of entails would, in 
all probability, only transfer the estates of the impoverished 
families to those who are already possessed of extensive 
domains. There would be no tendency to subdivision, 
because the oiler of ten thousand pounds for a small property 
that was only worth five thousand would be no temptation 
to a lord or duke, who has perhaps a clear income of a 
hundred thousand a year, and whose object is not to get 
money, but to get more land. That the abolition of entails 
would lead to the sale of land in such portions as would be 
convenient to the purchaser—that a farmer, for instance, 
who had been saving and successful, could go to his landlord 
and buy his farm at a fair market price, as he would buy a 
house or a ship—we certainly do not anticipate; for if the 
farm lay in the centre of an estate, the proprietor would not 
sell it for ten times its estimated value, nay, he would not 
sell it at all. The mere abolition of entails, therefore, 
although in itself a good and proper measure, would not be 
calculated to work apy great change for the general welfare. 
It might relieve some spendthrift families from the incon¬ 
venience of estates which they were unable to manage or 
redeem, and it might infuse new capital into the agricultural 
improvements of the country; but that it would materially 
affect the mass of the rural population to their advantage is 
by no means probable. At the same time, the total abolition 
of every remnant of the feudal system and of feudal practice 
in land conveyance is perhaps the first step to improvement. 
Another proposed remedy is the formation of peasant 
properties—a measure that has vehement advocates, and 
quite as vehement opponents, even among those who are 
supposed impartially to have investigated the subject. Mr. 
M'Cullocli, carried away with the one idea of cultivation on 
a large scale, assures us that anything like pcasantproprietor- 
ship would submerge us into a sea of pauperism. Mr. 
Joseph Kay, on the contrary, whose ability we take to he 
quite equal to that of Mr. M'Cullocli, and whose opportu¬ 
nities for extensive, accurate, and personal observation, we 
apprehend to have been even superior, assures us that the 
measure would tend to make our poorer classes happy, 
prudent, and prosperous. Mr. M'Cullocli’s objections wo 
regard as a long course of special pleading, based op the 
fallacy of taking a small portion of the population as the 
index of the whole. It is quite easy to point to one of our 
large farms, or to our whole system of large farming, and j 
to compare the amount of produce with the amount obtained 
from the same number of individuals in France, Germany, | 
or Ireland. From such premises, however, the conclusion ! 
is a mere partial inference from insufficient data. It is J 
quite easy to point to one of our regiments, and to admire i 
the order, cleanliness, and seeming perfection of the military I 
organization, just as Mr. Carlyle adduces the line-of-battle | 
ship as an instance of indubitable success, and asks why 
the same system is not universally introduced into the field 
of labour. But human nature is neither composed of 
regiments nor of line-of-battle ships, nor of any select body 
of men from whom the very young, the very old, the halt, 
the lame, and the blind, are sedulously and intentionally 
.excluded. When we look at a regiment, we must ask not 
only what is the condition of these yonng men, but what is 
the condition of their wives, their children, and their aged 
parents ? Muster the whole on parade, let us inspect the 
whole, and then we shall be able to form an opinion as to 
the success of the system. And so also, when Mr. M'Cullocli 
tells us to look at the success of our large properties and 
large farms,—let us look at the whole population—let us 
look at the fact, that at the very moment of his writing, 
about every tenth person in England was a pauper—let us 
look at our prisons, our poor laws, our union workhouses, 
our poisonings for the sake of burial fees, our emigration, 
as if our people were Hying like rats, belter skelter, from a 
drowning ship. Let us sum up the whole, and then perhaps 
we should find that our boasted system of social distribution 
was no more successful than the muster of one regiment, 
where we should find on the one hand, order and com¬ 
petence ; on the other, rags and tatters, wives abandoned, 
parents neglected, children left to the hazard of casual 
charity, and too often a dark shadow of vice and wretched¬ 
ness following in the train of our vaunted institutions. 
There is another special fallacy involved in the objections 
to peasant properties. We are told to compare ourselves with 
those countries where the great majority of the people are 
engaged in agriculture, and to mark their condition. We 
are told, with a singularly lame species of reasoning, that 
France is a nation of peasants—that France has peasant 
properties; and consequently, that if we have peasant 
properties, we shall become a nation of peasants also. 
But, in the first place, the question is not whether France 
may have run rather too far in one direction, but whether 
we have not run incomparably farther in the other; and, 
in the second place, France has at present no other means 
of employing her population except on the soil, whereas we 
can employ a hitherto unknown proportion of our people in 
manufacturing and commercial industry. No disposition of 
the land could ever again reduce Britain to the condition of 
France, because we have profitable manufacturers, holding 
out the prospect of a higher reward than can be derived 
from agriculture; and consequently it is as absurd to suppose 
that our people should again return to mere tillage, as that 
they should return to the hunting and savage state of the 
earlier ages. The question of peasant properties does not 
affect the majority of our population, but only that portion 
actually engaged in the culture of the soil; and here we 
believe that the allocation of a certain portion of land to our 
labouring agriculturists would go a great way to restore the 
stability and independence of our country population, and 
perhaps to revive those homely virtues which were once more j 
common than they are now, and which have waned exceed¬ 
ingly within the memory of those who are still alive. Of 1 
the positive advantages of having a peasantry rooted and ! 
grounded in the soil itself we say nothing, because there are j 
at present no means by which the change from the prevailing 
system could be effected; but it seems evident, that if our 
colonies and tfie States continue to present advantages 
which cannot be obtained at home, and if our people come 
to regard emigration, not as a matter of necessity-—not as a 
change which the indigent are obliged to make for the sake 
of the necessaries of life—but as an attractive removal to 
another sphere, in which they can employ their labour much 
more satisfactorily than in their native country—then we 
j must anticipate that a larger and larger portion of our best 
I labourers will seek to establish an independent existence 
i 
