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    prietor to find out , what his real power over his own property is , and which tends so greatly to fetter and impede the sale of land , by rendering its conveyance from man to man so difficult and expensive ; and when we remember how many centuries this system has existed , we see another singular instance of the difficulty and slowness with which the most useful and necessary national reforms are effected " These laws were framed and have been retained for the express purpose of keeping the land in the hands of a few proprietors , of depriving the peasants and small shopkeepers of any part of it , and of the influence which its possession confers , and of supporting a great landed proprietor class , in order to uphold the system of arisand to and i > r

    tocratic government , give greater strength stability to the Crown . * * * " In Great Britain and Ireland , in Russia , and in some parts of Austria alone , as many of my readers are aware , the land is still divided , and , so to speak , tied up , in a few hands and in immense estates ; and in these countries alone the old laws relating to landed property , which emanated from the feudal system , and which tend to prevent the subdivision of estates , still continue in force . These laws effect this end by means of the extraordinary powers which they confer upon owners of land . They enable an owner of land to prevent the sale of the land by himself during his own life , by his creditors , and by any successor or other person for many years after his own death . ,

    " They enable an owner of an estate in fee simple ( i . e ., of an estate which the owner can sell so as to give the purchaser full powers of selling it to whomsoever he pleases ) , not only to dispose of his land during his own lifetime , and to leave the whole estate in it to any one he pleases after his death , but to do very much more . They enable him , if he has not been prevented by the settlement or will of a former proprietor , to grant by his settlement , or to leave by his will , different interests in his land to a number of persons , and so to arrange the succession to the ownership of the property by his settlement or will , that no person or persons shall be able to sell any portion of the land , until some person , who was

    ah infant at the time of making the settlement , or at the death of the person having made the will has grown up , married , and had a son , and until that son has attained the age of twenty-one years , and not even then , so as to confer a right to the immediate possession of it , unless all those who have any interest in the land prior to that of the last-mentioned son , are dead , or join in the sale . ** " It may be stated , generally , that these laws enable an owner of land , by his settlement or will , so to affect his estate that it cannot possibly be sold , in many cases , for about fifty , and , in some cases , for even sixty , seventy , or a hundred years , after the making of the settlement or will .

    " However advisable it may be that the estate should be sold for the sake of all those who are interested in it , such is the state of the law that in many cases this is impossible , owing to the terms of the settlement or will of some former proprietor , who died , it may be fifty , sixty , seventy , or eighty years ago . " Our law is not content with giving the living man full power over the land , but it gives his corpse , so to speak , a controlling power long after breath has departed , and after the circumstances of the family or nation have changed . " Owners of land arc also enabled in certain cases to

    make long leases of their land , and to introduce into these leases clauses which prevent the land being underlet or sold , or treated in any of the excepted manners mentioned in the lease . Such leases often affect the land for many years ; sometimes for several generations after the death of those who made them ; and often prevent improvements which the progress of science , long after the decease of the person who so affected the land , has rendered not only possible but expedient . " He thus sums up the effect of our law of property : —

    " 1 . It causes the land to accumulate in the hands of a few proprietors ; it prevents it selling , in the generality of instances , in small estates ; it has for the last two hundred years tended gradually , but continually , to merge all small freehold properties in the great estates , until the old race of yeomen freeholders and small copyholders , who , eighty years since , were to be found all over our island , has almost entirely disappeared ; it thus deprives the farmers , the shopkeepers , and the peasants of almost every chance of purchasing small plots of land , except for building purposes , in the neighbourhood of the towns ; it promotes a system of largo farms , and by so doing lessens the number of small farms , and renders it every yenr more and more difficult for a pea-Bant to rent a farm and to raise himself to the next step

    in the social scale ; nnd it thus deprives the peasant of all strong motives to exercise exertion , self-denial , economy , or prudence , renders his prospect hopeless , and condemns him to pauperism . 11 2 . It tends in many instances to cheat creditors of landlords of their just claims . If a man purchase land and get deeply into debt , and afterwards marry , and if upon his marriage , and while he is still in debt , he makes n settlement of his property in consideration of his marriage , and ultei wards die , not having paid his debts , and leaving no money or other property besides the land , or not sutliciont money wherewith to pay his debts , his creditors cannot sell a bit of the land so settled , and have no means of recovering their debts , although they were induced to trust him before his marriage by sccinff him m po 88 C 8 SJon of the property .

    " If , too a man has n great house and estate which belong to him lor his lifetime only , under his own or Borne prior settlement , and if shopkeepers and tradesmen , ttceing him in possession of this great house nnd estate , allow him to run up long accounts with them , believing him to be able to pay any amount of claim upon \ ilm , and if tins wealthy owner die very much in debt

    and leaving no money , the poor creditors , who had no means of learning whether the land belonged to him for more than his own life or not , cannot , after his death , recover a farthing of their debts , even if their debtor was possessed during his lifetime of a million acres of land . " 3 . It tends also in very many instances to keep large estates out of the market for fifty , eighty , or one hundred years , when , if it had not been for these laws , the proprietor would either have been compelled to sell them by his own extravagance , or by his bad and unskilful farming or management ; or when he would have voluntarily sold either part of them , in order to obtain capital wherewith to cultivate the other part better , or the whole of them , in order to engage in other pursuits more congenial to his tastes . " 4 . It induces unprincipled proprietors to be tenfold more careless than they otherwise would be about the education of the child who is to succeed them ; for they reason , with great truth , that , whatever their own extravagance , the child will take the property which is settled upon him , unaffected by his father ' s debts , and , whatever the child ' s extravagance and folly , he will not be able to dissipate the property , or to lower the social station of the family , ft thus often puts into the influential places of the land men whose early education and habits have rendered them totally unfit to be intrusted with any influence whatever , and who never would have enjoyed that influence if it had not been for this state of the law ; and it thus often sets up as examples for society persons of depraved tastes and corrupted morals . " If a proprietor is extravagant , this state of the law , in the vast majority of cases , saves his estate from being sold either by himself or his creditors ; and , if he is prudent , it often enables him to add to the property , to entail , in many cases , again , and so to hand it , undivided and increased in extent , through several successive hands again . " 5 . It supports a large body of old men and young men , who are not obliged to work for their living , —who are kept by the laws in their positions , however unworthy of those positions they may be , —who have never been obliged to study or improve their minds , —who have , therefore , often grown up in ignorance and frivolity , — who are so rich as to enable them to exercise an immense influence in the state , and to make their own conduct and manners the standard for all thoughtless and weakminded men , and who , therefore , more than any other class , foster habits of extravagance , effeminacy , luxury , and immorality . " The effect of these restrictions is manifold . They make landed proprietors an increasing minority from the tendency of large estates to swallow the small ; they render the peasant ' s condition , hopeless ; they impede the cultivation of the soil and accumulate vast tracts of wasteland ( in 1847 there were 11 , 300 , 000 acres wholly uncultivated !) , which might easily be made fruitful ; and they prevent the poor from having even decent cottages . The horrible results of crowding families into one cottage , mingling the sexes in a revolting promiscuity , preventing the possibility of cleanliness and order , and very seriously affecting the sanitary condition of the poor , have been detailed by many indignant enquirers ; and in this volume Mr . Kay has collected a fearful amount of evidence on the subject . But how remedy them ? Population increases , and cottages are not built . " But if the cottages are so much in demand , it may be asked , why , if the landlords will not build them , others , who are neither labourers nor landlords , do not do so ? There could not be a more profitable investment of capital , when the rents are regularly paid , and many would so invest , if it were in their power to do so . But cottages cannot be built in the air , although their foundations are sometimes laid in water . Those who would willingly invest their money in building them cannot get the land on which to build them . All the land about Wareham is so strictly settled as scarcely to admit of this . If one of the most respectable inhabitants of "VVarcham wanted to build himself a house , it is questionable if he could get the land . Not that the landlords would in all cases refuse it , but that in many cases they cannot part with it . A rather ludicrous instance of this occurred a short time ago . A firm in Wareham had negotiated with one of the neighbouring proprietors for a lease of a certain piece of land for some works , which were to be carried on upon it ; but when the agreement came to be carried out , the proprietor found that he had so strictly tied up the land that he could not give the lease . " Turning from Mr . Kay ' s demonstration of the benc-Jits of peasant proprietorship , to look for a moment on the dangers of such a condition , when universal , we see the necessity of a larger social theory than that of small far . us and education . Mr . Lning , in his Observations on Europe * has pointed out the economical advantages of email farms , and their superiority over large farms , but ho does not conceal their disadvantages in a social view , as tending to a stationary condition with a low ideal . It subordinates life to the means of living — propter vitam vivendi pcrdcre causas . Now , unless it contain dynamic power , no theory of social life can bo worthy our attention ; the principle of indefinite progression is worked into our being , and must find issue in our theories . Mr . Laing has shown that the condition of peasant proprietorship tends to perpetuate a state of vulgar

    wellbeing ; and Mr . Kay , though he does not seem to concur in this , does nevertheless imply it in his frequent eulogies of the conservatism of peasant proprietors . But from Mr . La ing , as from Mr . Kay , we separate , and declare that their arguments force upon us the conviction that in Association alone are we to find an issue from our difficulties . By Association you would , in small farming , realize the double

    advantages of large capital and subdivided land—it would be the proper division of labour , which , as Gibbon Wakefield truly says , is the ' * combination of labour with division of employments . " Mr . Kay points to this in answering the objection of the large farming theorists , that small holders would be unable to possess themselves of the expensive machinery which science has invented , and will invent , to carry out agricultural improvements ; the objection , he

    says , " Is more specious than true . The more intelligence advances among the small proprietors , by means of the agricultural colleges and of the schools of agricultural chemistry , which are being founded throughout Germany , Switzerland , France , Belgium , and Holland , for the express purpose of training the children of the peasant farmers in the science of agriculture , and which are

    raising up a class of small proprietor farmers , who , for the knowledge of agriculture , put to shame the majority of our large tenant farmers—the more , I repeat , intelligence advances by these means among the small proprietors , the better will they understand how to combine among themselves so as to help one another to carry out those particular operations which require an accumulation of capital for their successful prosecution .

    " As Counsellor Reichensperger says , ' there is nothing to prevent small proprietors availing themselves of the more costly agricultural machines , if several of them unite in the purchase of them , and keep them for common use . It is always a very easy matter , so to arrange the agricultural operations of several farms , that one machine may perform them all without putting any of the proprietors to any inconvenience . Unless the laws of property—especially those affecting land—are speedily altered , England will have a terrible struggle to pass through . ; for , as Mr . Kay truly says , our conservatism , is of the few , and not the conservatism of the masses . The condition of the

    people becames yearly more desperate , while that of the wealthy classes becomes more splendid and luxurious . The estates gather into fewer hands . In 1770 there were 250 , 000 freehold estates in England , in the hands of as many families . In 1815 these 250 , 000 proprietors had dwindled down to 32 , 000 ! Since then the same process has been going on : a monopoly of land which implies extraordinary simplicity , gullibility , or patience in a people to suffer ! The same appetite of large fishes devouring small is seen in commerce . The large shops absorb the small ; the men who some years ago would have had shops of their own , now , with white neckcloths and

    mellifluous lying , serve you in some " Emporium : ' they are hired servants , who would have been proprietors . We also hear much of the Emancipation of man by Machinery . That , doubtless , is the goal of our industry . But , if the present system is to continue , what will become of the " emancipated " masses ? Machinery will more and more dispense with their labour , and they—may starve : at the banquet of life no knife and fork has been laid for them !

    If the one argument derived from the miseries created by machinery were the only one to be adduced against our present system , it would be sufficient to condemn it . What ! is that a true system of society wherein a gigantic improvement is a heavy curse to thousands , wherein the simplification of those processes by which we subdue Nature is the cause of destitution to those who live by labour , wherein man is emancipated only to starve ! If so , we can tell our rulers that this true system will shortly be violently set aside for another , unless it be peacefully replaced by another ; and , to accomplish this peaceful revolution , what is needed ? Education . On this we shall hear Mr . Kay .

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    BOOKS ON OUR TABLE . Bricftoechscl Zwischen Goethe und Jleinhard . Stuttgnrt . London : 1 'ranz Thiinm . This correspondence is a new link in the Goethe literature ; we doubt whether many more collections of this kind will make their appearance , for we possess now the correspondence with Schiller , Zelter , Bettina ; withFrau von Stein , Iliemer , with Merk , Goethe's Briefe an Lcipziger Freunde , and a goodly number of other letters published in various collections . lteinhard became acquainted with Goethe at Carlsbad , in 1807 and he corresponded with him from this time until the death of the poet . The letters of 1807-1808 are dated from the Rhine and from Paris . 1808-1813 , Reinhard was Freneh Ambassador at Cassel ; 1814-1815 , he held the office of Directeur des Chancelleries at the

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    498 Mtft QtZtftt * [ Satorday ;

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Aug. 17, 1850, page 498, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1850/page/18/