Notes 1 It would be unjust to assert that the landholders have premeditated and intended to effect this oppression of the cultivators, so injurious to that order of men, and so little profitable to the landholders themselves; it would be a mistake to suppose that it has been accomplished by any concerted plan of iniquity and fraud. No, it is the course of things that has brought it gradually forward: the natural submission of dependents has been insensibly enforced to this degree; the cultivators have not been sufficiently aware to protect their own right; still less has the sovereign power been attentive to protect the most useful order of men in the State.
2 If it be asked what is the most natural state of huma" kind, it may be replied, that in which the whole tribe o race approach near to one common standard of comeliness and strength, without any mixture of deformed, dwarfish, or mutilated individuals. In other species of animals, this is always found to take place in their natural state.
If we would ascertain whether the slaves of antiquity-were more or less happy than the modern artisans, manufacturers, cottars, and men of various degraded ranks and vocations, abounding in great cities, we ought to inquire whether they degenerated as perceptibly, and became as dwarfish and deformed, as the races of these men become.
3 That nation is greatly deceived and misled which bestows any encouragement on manufactures for exportation, or for any purpose but the necessary internal supply, until the great manufactures of grain and pasturage are carried to their utmost extent. It can never be the interest of the community to do so; it may be that of the landholders, who desire indeed to be considered as the nation itself, or at least as being representatives of the nation, and having the same interest with the whole body of the people.
In fact, however, their interest is, in some most important respects, directly opposite to that of the great body of the community, over whom they exercise an ill-regulated jurisdiction, together with an oppressive monopoly in the commerce of land to be hired for cultivation.
The encouragements granted to commerce and manufactures, and so universally extolled, seem merely schemes devised for employing the poor and finding subsistence for them, in that manner which may bring most immediate profit to the rich: and these methods are, if not deliberately, at least without inquiry, preferred to others, which might bring greater advantage to the body of the people directly, and ultimately even to the rich themselves.
4 The progress of agriculture will more readily excite the activity of manufactures, and carry that branch of national industry to its proper pitch, than the progress of manufactures will carry agriculture to its most prosperous state, though each, it must be confessed, has a reciprocal influence on the other.
In certain countries, manufactures seem to have advanced beyond their proper pitch, and begin very sensibly to affect the race of people and their manners.
Notwithstanding the great progress which agriculture has made in England, still greater remains to be made: though regarded by foreign nations as an example worthy of imitation, it remains for Britain still to surpass the best examples hitherto given.
The chief obstacle to rapid improvement of agriculture is plainly that monopoly of land which resides in the proprietors, and which the commercial system of the present age has taught them to exercise with artful strictness, almost everywhere.
5 The fields around every gentleman's seat are cultivated in a better manner, and raised to a higher degree of fertility, than those of the adjacent farms, because they have been for ages cultivated by the proprietors of the soil: in them is seen to what degree of fertility the whole cultivable lands of any country may be brought, were every field in like manner cultivated by its proprietor.
There is no natural obstacle to prevent the most barren ground from being brought by culture to the same degree of fertility with the kitchen garden of a villa, or the suburbs of a great town. An attentive application of the natural manure of the fields may effect it in a long course of, time: the plentiful and judicious use of extraneous manures, the great fund of which in the limestone quarries and marl pits of the earth cannot be exhausted, will accomplish it in a much shorter period; but the present care and the secure interest of a proprietor is required for both.
With a view to depreciate the public credit and resources of this nation, it has been observed that England has almost no uncultivated land to be improved. But the author (Dr Franklin, in a paper circulated in 1777) of that observation knows well, that four-fifth parts of the cultivated lands of England are cultivated in a very imperfect manner, and may yet be raised to a fertility twice if not three times as great as that which they presently have.- -- This is a fund to which the wisdom of the nation may sometime have recourse; and by which the industry and internal wealth of the community may be supported, even in the worst extremities; nor can it be torn from us but with the independence of the State.
An unlimited property in land ought not to be possessed by any citizen; a restricted property in land cannot be communicated to too great a number.
That high prosperity which some states have attained, by the encouragement of manufactures, and the prosecution of commerce, on enlarged and liberal principles, has become of late the object of emulation, perhaps of envy, to others, so that all civilised nations are now impatient to become manufacturing and commercial in their turn. Yet before the example was set, no one had apprehended the possibility of exciting so much active industry, nor the important effects it was to produce in the great system of Europe.
Hereafter, perhaps, some fortunate nation will give the example of setting agriculture free from its fetters also, and of introducing a change in that department of industry, similar to that which has been accomplished in manufactures and commerce, by the dissolving of monopolies, and removing obstructions and restraints. A new emulation will then arise among the nations hastening to acquire that still higher vigour and prosperity, which the emancipation of the first and most useful of all arts cannot fail to produce.
Cultivation by slaves,^by villeins, and by metayers, have succeeded one another all over the west of Europe. In England, even the last of these is totally worn out, and has given place to cultivation by farmers, whilst in France two-third parts of the land is still cultivated by metayers, and in Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Russia a yet greater proportion is still cultivated by villeins and slaves. In all these successive changes the landholder has still found his advantage in communicating to the occupier of the ground a greater and greater degree of security in his possession, and the public prosperity has kept pace with this good administration of the landholder's private estate. England perhaps owes that power and lustre, by which she surpasses other nations, chiefly to her having preceded them in the prosecution of these changes. Ought it not therefore to be tried whether the landholder may not still further improve his own interest, as well as the public good, by pursuing the same line a little farther, and communicating still greater security and independence to the cultivators of his fields?
No impracticable Utopian scheme can be said to be suggested, in proposing that property in land should be diffused to as great a number of citizens as may desire it: that is only proposing to carry somewhat farther, and render more extensive, a plan which the experience of many ages has shown to be very practicable, and highly beneficial in every public and private respect.
It is the oppression of the landholders and their agents, which has ever been the bane of Europe, more than even the oppression of the most arbitrary governments; and the absence of this more close and prying oppression renders the despotic governments of the East not intolerable to their subjects. However numerous and powerful that body of men, by whom this oppressive right is presently exercised, it may in the course of ages be reduced within proper limits, as other exorbitant invasions of the common rights of men have sometimes been.
The institutions of the Mosaical law respecting property in land have been but little attended to by the learned.
To that most respectable system an appeal may be made in support of these speculations; for the aim of the Mosaical regulations plainly is, that every field should be cultivated by its proprietor, and that every descendant of Jacob should possess in full property a field which he might cultivate.
Whoever shall consider the probable effect of such an institution in increasing the number of people, will cease to wonder at the uncommon populousness of Judea in ancient times. The same effect might be renewed in that country, could these Agrarian regulations be restored to their force. The same effect might be exhibited in almost any district of Europe in which they could be established for any length of time.
While sovereigns, judges, and clergymen, have made continual reference to the Mosaical law, as to a standard by which their regulations and their claims were justified and enforced, it may seem strange, and worthy of regret, that the common people have never had recourse to the same standard, and claimed the advantages of an Agrarian institution, so favourable to the independence of agriculture, the increase of population, and the comfortable state of the lower classes of men.
Occasion will be found of treating more at length of the Mosaical Agrarian, considered as an economical regulation, in a history of property in land, which may hereafter be offered to the public.
In any just system of regulations relative to property in land, the chief difficulty must be to reconcile the interests of an improving agriculture with the natural rights of every individual to a certain share of the soil of his country; but in the present state of municipal law in Europe, the interest of improving agriculture is sacrificed, and yet the right of the people to a common possession, or to equal shares on partition, is not provided for. Both are given up, in favour of the lordly rights of one pre-eminent order of men.