ductiveness. But this can only be effected by a body of cultivators possessed of ample capital, and occupying their farms under such conditions as will make it their interest to manage them in the most perfect manner. That the landowner is equally interested in this state of things is convincingly demonstrated by a comparison of the rent of land of equal natural qualities in England and throughout the Continent. But the experience of every age and country has proved, we fear, that if it be left to the wisdom and foresight of the landowner to encourage the growth of such a tenantry, it will never take place. The miserable scantiness of the produce of the greater part of the cultivated earth is manifestly owing to the want of capital and skill,-the poverty and degradationof the peasant cultivators; a condition which is directly caused by the extortionate rapacity of those persons, whether kings, nobles, or lesser proprietors, who have established a claim to the ownership of the soil. Wheresoever circumstances have compelled a relaxation of the gripe in which the cultivators are generally held by these terrarum domini, they have uniformly been found to take advantage of it for the extension and improve- ment of agriculture. The forcible emancipation of the great body of cultivators in France, by her first revolution, from the oppressive bondage in which they were previously held by their landlords, has, in spite of the destructive circumstances by which that revolution was attended, and for a long period followed-in spite of the desolating effects of the conscriptions of Napoleon, occasioned so vast an increase in the revenues of the great THE PROSPERITY OF TENANTS. 129 body of agriculturists, that France consumes now more than three times the quantity of manufactured commodities she did before that epoch, and her non-agricultural population has doubled. These facts tell how much she lost in wealth by the feebleness of the agricultural efforts of the peasantry under the old régime. We repeat, that from the landowners of a country it must not be expected that they will spontaneously afford that immediate relaxation of their power over their tenantry which is necessary to allow the latter to emerge from a state of poverty, and cultivate with spirit and effect. This has ever been, and must be, the work of a superior power,whether proceeding from above or from below, acting with the calmness of deliberate wisdom, or the convulsive reaction of turbulent despair,-by which the landowner is compelled to take those steps which are as necessary for his own as for the general benefit. A striking illustration of the truth of this position,-which, harsh as it may sound, is in accordance with every known fact, as well as the recognized principles of human conduct-is presented by the actual condition of Ireland. In that country we may see the natural effects of uncontrolled power in a landed aristocracy to dictate the terms on which the soil shall be cultivated by the native population. There the far greater proportion of the land is tenanted by the very lowest class of peasantry, possessed of neither skill nor capital, each occupying in fact but a rude turf cabin and a plot of potato ground, with perhaps the run of a cow in the neighbouring common or bog. And K these cottier tenants (as they are called) are driven by the competition of their continually increasing numbers, to offer for this miserable holding a money rent so high as to leave them but an inadequate supply of the coarsest fare. The condition of the Irish peasantry proves that even where usurpation has not proceeded to the extreme length of claiming a property in the persons of its subjects, still the exclusive ownership of the soilwhich the bulk of the people must obtain leave to cultivate, or starve,-enables the land proprietors of a poor but populous country to impose on them any terms they are pleased to exact, and thus virtually, if not nominally, to enslave them. The cottier is, in fact, an instrument which the Irish landlord employs to wring from his estate the utmost return an imperfect system can produce, and when it has served his turn, flings away to rot on the nearest dunghill. The law mocks the Irish peasant with the title of freeman. He is free only to starve,-for the same law confers an unconditional monopoly of the soil of his native island on a few individuals, and he must accept the terms they choose to offer, however hard, or perish of famine. And there, as elsewhere, it happens that the over-reaching avarice of the landowner, by clutching at all hazards an immediate gain, keeps the peasant cultivator in a state of misery, degradation, and helplessness, which totally incapacitates him from developing the productiveness of the land entrusted to him, to the great ultimate loss of its proprietor. Hence it is that a country blest by nature with a soil of unexampled fertility, intersected by magnificent navigable rivers, situated OCCUPATION OF LAND IN AMERICA. 131 in the most favourable climate, and inhabited by an active, spirited, and energetic population, within reach of all the advantages of the highest civilization, and protected from external injury by a wealthy and powerful government,-offers a picture of discontent and turbulence, of moral degradation and physical want, probably unequalled in any other quarter of the globe. Even in England the mistaken selfishness of the landlord class is exemplified, in their attempts by means of the corn laws to confine the increasing population of the country to food grown on her limited soils. The injury which they themselves sustain by thus checking the extension of our manufacturing industry, and pauperizing a large portion of the population which might maintain itself if it were allowed to exchange the produce of its labour with the foreigner for food,-is easily demonstrable, and will be reverted to in a subsequent chapter. In the northern division of the New World, and in some of our Australian colonies, we may see a system in practice very different from any of those we have been employed in contemplating,-a system approaching perhaps as nearly as is desirable to the natural and equitable law of land proprietorship. Those vast territories, throughout which man was, up to a very late period, a comparative stranger, offered an almost boundless extent of surface for his occupation. The adventurers that migrated from the old world to settle on these fair shores, bringing with them both a knowledge of the arts of civilized life, and the habits and maxims of regulated freedom, found there on their arrival no powerful monopolists claiming, on the plea of ancient grants or modern conquest, to exclude them from their just place at the bosom of mother earth-no arbitrary despot proclaiming himself, by right divine, lord of Heaven and earth and all that is therein, and urging them to toil only that, like the bee-master, he might despoil them of the honey they should store;-they had 'The world before them where to choose, Each took possession of as much land as he found it convenient to cultivate, and rejoiced to find others fixing their choice in his immediate vicinity, and sharing with him the well-known advantages of a division and exchange of labour. As the settlements advanced, and it was found to be for the common interest that the occupation of fresh land should be regulated in a systematic manner, for the sake of more effectually securing proper communications and measures for internal security and external defence, the state was appointed proprietor of all the unoccupied lands, but only with the view of their being dealt out to all who might wish to settle, upon such terms and in so regulated a manner as would ultimately be most conducive to the benefit of the settlers themselves. -- Here was a practical adoption through an extensive tract of country of those simple and natural principles which we have shown ought every where to regulate the appropriation of land, the common bounty of the Creator. We see its results in the extraordinarily rapid increase of wealth and population among the settlers wherever |