any other class in their isolated struggles to
free themselves from galling trammels, obsolete
customs, and most discouraging leases.

The experience of the last few years has
taught us, that after commerce and enterprise
have done their best in the old and new
world, the comfortable sustenance of the
British population will mainly depend on the
rational cultivation of the land of the British
islands.  When we have done our best at
home in raising corn and grain, we still
want many a ship-load from abroad; but
all that the favourable sun and soil of foreign
lands can spare, will still leave a large vacuum
to be filled by that stout subject, the British
farmer.

It is, therefore, the plain interest of every
customer for what the French call, expressively,
comestibles, that every acre of British
ground should produce as much corn, roots,
meat, butter and cheese, as will pay for the
cost of growing.  How is this to be done?
The expedients of bonuses, premiums, and
protective duties, have been fairly tried and
wisely abandoned as unjust and inefficient.
What is wanted, then, to enable the farmer
to do his best, and the farm-land to produce
the most?  Clearly, a landlord with intelligence
enough, and capital enough, to let his
land with all the materials or plant for the
best style of cultivation; and a tenant with
intelligence enough to provide and use the
livestock, the implements, the manures, and
the seeds, to set the farm to work to
manufacture animal and vegetable food with the
help of the finest machinery provided by the
landlord.

Let us imagine, that the landlord and
the tenant, and the farm, are all what they
ought to be for making the most profit out of
the most produce, still there is one element
wanting, without which no wise farmer—no
farmer who has anything to lose, will sink his
seeds and manures in the soil, or invest his
cash in the livestock that make the glory of
good farming.

That element is security of tenure.  Three
removes, according to good housewives, are
as bad as a fire.  If that be the case with pots,
pans, and pianos; what must it be with farm
stock and implements!  It is not difficult for the
most unlearned in rural matters to imagine,
what it must be with rotation of crops, the
fourfold, fivefold, or sixfold system, by which
each crop prepares the land for a successor
of a different kind, and by which the whole
cultivation is incomplete until wound up by
the last crop, as, for instance, on the sand
land of Bedfordshire: first, turnips; second,
barley; third, clover; fourth, wheat, the
wheat bringing the farmer home for the
balance of cost of the three preceding crops.

After this technical, but indispensable
explanation, our non-rural readers will be
surprised to learn that, at an agricultural
gathering in the city of a great agricultural
county, a gentleman of influence in
agricultural management gravely proposed a
model agreement for the county based on an
annual tenure; gravely proposed that the
best farmers (for to a model standing agreement
accepted by a county no tenant dare
object) shall settle and sink capital on land—
say to the extent of the maximum of ten
pounds sterling an acre—on the risk that a
death, a contested election, a quarrel with
the landlord's gamekeeper, or a hasty word
maliciously reported from a market-dinner
(all common cases) may send him on his
travels to seek another farm, with the poor
compensation of a contested arbitration for
unexhausted improvements.

The author of this model agreement is, of
course, a lawyer.  It is intended "to give a
stimulus to agricultural improvement" by a
written agreement for a year's tenancy.  Just
the sort of stimulus, we should say, that the
presence of a police officer in every street
gives to industry, gratitude, temperance,
beneficence, and the other active virtues.
"There,"  said a great sugar-baker to us
one day, showing a sheet of letter-paper,
"are the terms on which I have bought
thirty thousand pounds' worth of sugar.  If
a lawyer had settled the agreement, he
would have filled a chest with papers, raised
a hundred doubts and difficulties, and laid
the foundation of a dozen suits in trying to
prevent me and the importer from robbing
each other."  Therefore we say emphatically
that the lawyer should be the last person to
be consulted in an agricultural agreement,
and then solely for the form; the substance
can only be usefully settled by agricultural
experience.

So thought apparently Mr. I. T. Danson,
who appears not to share the feelings of awe
and dread which silence his fellow farmers of
Cheshire in the presence of a lawyer land-
agent.  He ventured to canvass the attorney's
agricultural agreement in the columns of a
local paper, and has since republished his
letter in a pamphlet well worth the
consideration of landlords who prefer trusting
their land to intelligent, improving,
independent tenants with capital, rather than
to the ignorant, subservient serfs.

Judging from the cool, curt reply of the
lawyer land-agent, to a very polite communication
from the tenant farmer, it is considered
a great liberty for a tenant farmer in Cheshire
to do more than touch his hat to the agent
and pay his rent when he can! *

*  Agriculture in Cheshire: Five Letters from a Tenant
Farmer, on Farmers' Agreements.

With the cardinal blunder of a tenancy
from year to year we might leave this
scheme of agricultural improvement, which
one farmer only dared to object to at
a public meeting with a landlord in the
chair, and not one ventured to discuss in the
committee appointed to consider it.  But on
a bread and cheese question, even at the risk
of fatiguing our non-agricultural friends, we