farm under another gentleman, and took the land in question into his own possession.

Dr. Rigby states that at the time he wrote, from long leases and the most liberal encouragement to an improved system of agriculture, the total increase on Mr. Coke's Norfolk rents amounted to 20,000l. a year, not only without distressing his tenants, but with improving their situationa creation of wealth, he observes, probably unexampled, except in the vicinity of large towns, or in populous manufacturing districts. Many improvements in husbandry have been made at much too great an expense: by the forced prices of produce during the war, an unnatural stimulus was given to the agricultural interest, which, being withdrawn when the war ceased, left a dreadful lassitude and languor as its necessary consequence. Much larger crops were then, and, indeed, are now obtained than formerly, but the profits are sometimes swallowed up in the expenses to obtain them, and it is a grievous mistake, either for individuals or the state, to fix their attention on the gross produce of their farms, or of the country at large, rather than on the net produce. Wherever an increase of produce can be obtained at a diminished expense, an increase of wealth ensues; but on no other condition: to assume the contrary, is to assume that the wages of workmen are more conducive to the wealth of any state, or of any farmer, if you please, than the profits of capital; and that a state, or a farm, in which labour yields an amount of produce only equivalent to the wages of the workmen employed, will be as rich or prosperous as another state or farm in which the labour employed yields an amount of produce which exceeds the wages of its workmen, and which, by means of this excess, can maintain a number of ingenious and industrious classes. Net produce, therefore, is the measure of all wealth and power, whether on a large scale or a small one; but net produce must always bear an inverse proportion to the cost of production; and as MACHINERY is the most powerful means of reducing this cost, the more it can be substituted for manual labour the better, since it leaves a larger surplus of revenue to be employed in other directions. Machinery has been no where more unsparingly used than at Holkham; but instead of throwing people out of employment, it has increased the amount of it. Three times the number of inhabitants are

now maintained on the same space of ground as before. Mr. Coke himself stated, from actual enumeration, at one of his sheep-shews, that within a few years, since cultivation had advanced by the union of capital and skill, and by the increased use of machinery, his own village had risen from two to six hundred. Men, women, and children are all abundantly provided with employment, well fed, well clothed, and well housed. There was formerly a workhouse; but the principal inhabitants of the neighbourhood representing to him that it was no longer wanted, but became a burden to keep it up, the number of poor being so much diminished that they had scarcely any inmates; at their desire the workhouse was pulled down.

Agriculture is the foundation of manufactures, since the productions of nature are the materials of art; but all improvements in it should be carried on at the lowest cost, and it may well be doubted whether, in the long run, agriculture would be much benefited by high prices. It is by means of the husbandman that all the inhabitants of a country are enabled to live; they are the consumers of his goods, they are his customers, and the greater the number of inhabitants, the more extensive is his market: he consults his own interests, therefore, by the cheapness of provisions, which is the only means by which the population of a country can be advantageously promoted. The vegetative powers of the earth cannot be made always to exert themselves to the utmost, without an expense which no increase of produce can compensate; and if we go on with extraordinary methods of culture, expecting that the fecundity of any soil is inexhaustible, we deceive ourselves. The farmer must be compensated by high prices, which, if he could exact them, would be ruinous to the community; but as he cannot exact them, the ruin must fall on himself.

All

Various have been the opinions entertained as to the comparative productiveness of different sorts of labour; some concede the pre-eminence to agriculture, some to commerce; but idle are such discussions! It is almost like discussing which is the more useful member, the leg or the arm. sorts of labour, by which a man can gain his living, are, in the language of common sense, and barring all metaphysical refinement, productive. Dull, indeed, must that man be who is neither witty himself, nor the cause of wit in others,

and sterile must be that labour which is neither productive itself, nor the cause of productiveness to others. Here lies the mistake. The labour of a musician, it is true, is not fixed on a permanent object, like that of a carpenter or a busbandman; he certainly cannot bottle the notes which he draws from his fiddle, as the peasant bottles the juice which he draws from his grapes; but in the merry season of vintage, when the plains of Burgundy and Champagne are alive to every feeling of joy and hilarity, the peasant will gladly exchange a few clusters of his grapes and a few bottles of his wine, with the minstrel who shall set the dance a-going by the sprightliness of his music. All labour, therefore, that has an exchangeable value, may be fairly termed productive, of whatever nature it may be. It was the fashion formerly among political economists, both of France and England, to give more, perhaps, than its due honours to the plough; it certainly is no less the fashion in these times to withhold from it even the commonest courtesies of civility, and to defraud it of its due: it is considered by the new school of political economists, as only fit to be encouraged in youthful or half-civilized communities, and as beneath the attention of a nation so adult, so intellectual, so full of capital, and so pregnant with mechanical science, as England. We want no unfair and partial protection; we want not the king of England, like the emperor of China, to plough a furrow of land in person at the beginning of every spring, attended by all the princes and grandees of the empire; we want no high-priest to perform a solemn sacrifice to Chang-Ti, for the ensurance of a plentiful crop; we want no divine honours, as of old in India, to be paid to Bacchus, and in Egypt, to Isis and Osiris. The natural encouragement to agriculture is an industrious population, which can purchase its productions; not a pennyless and wretched people, like those of Ireland; such a population, we know too well, may starve in the midst of plenty; with such a population, crops may fall ungathered to the ground, and afterwards, the ground itself lie fallow, from the want of encouragement to till it. The agriculture of Ireland is execrable, with a soil of unparalleled fertility, that will bear the most merciless succession of crops without exhaustion, The agriculture of Flanders, on the contrary, particularly in the eastern and western provinces, where the skill of the

farmer has to contend with the disadvantages of an inferior soil, is of the best description. There is one brauch of it which is well deserving the attention of the Norfolk farmer, and of those throughout the whole country,-this is the extreme and economical attention paid by the Flemish to their working horses.

We have often persuaded ourselves to believe that twothirds of the working horses in this kingdom, well fed, well groomed, and kindly treated, would do all the work that is performed by the entire number now employed: undoubtedly the dray-horses that we see in the beer-drays and coalcarts of London are in the very highest condition; and of late years, the velocipedes that are harnessed to the flying coaches which traverse the kingdom in every direction have been beautiful animals; but when we turn our eyes to the miserable, jaded, galled, and half-famished things, those dried specimens that drag the hackney coaches in Loudon, and some of the post-chaises on our roads,-when we look at the lean-ribbed wretches in our hucksters' and pedlars' carts, and at the living skeletons that disgrace our little farmers and jobbers in different parts of the country, we then ask, whether it would not be economical as well as humane to shoot one-third of them, and keep the remainder better? In Flanders, a farmer will work fifty acres of land with two horses, and by the regularity of his care and keep, will preserve them in excellent condition, while the great wheat farmer of Fingal will keep four times the number on the same extent, which are fed with great expense and little judgment, which are always over-worked and always poor: nay, we are told that some Irish farmers will keep sixteen horses on a hundred acres; and instances have occurred in which three-fourths have died within the year by hardship and consequent disease. Is it not, then, a most beautiful provision of Providence, that humanity and self-interest invariably go hand in hand? A Norfolk man can hardly travel twenty miles out of his own county, without seeing four horses yoked to a plough, with a boy to lead and a man to drive them: this is making agriculture too expensive. The Flemish horses are very compact and well-built, much like the Suffolk Punch; they are fed on cut hay or rye

See the Rev. Mr. Radcliffe's "Report" of the Flemish Agriculture, drawn up at the desire of the Farming Society of Ireland.

straw, with oats, and after every feed they have a bucket of water given them, richly whitened with rye or oatmeal; a vessel containing this composition is kept in every stable, and the horses are not suffered to have any other drink ; each is allowed in winter fifteen pounds of hay, ten pounds of sweet straw, and eight pounds of oats, every day. In summer, clover is substituted for hay; but the oat or ryemeal water is never omitted; and on this nutritious drink the Flemish place their chief reliance for being able to do so much work with so few horses, and to keep those horses in good condition. This is a lesson worth learning.

We have said that the agriculture of Norfolk is chiefly indebted for its improvement to the extended culture of the turnip and its congeners; a term rather vaguely used, perhaps, in this instance, but intended to signify those plants which are grown in the summer, and preserved fresh for the purpose of feeding sheep and oxen in the winter. Parsnips and carrots are not in general cultivation for this purpose among us; they require, perhaps, a depth of soil as well as friability, which cannot always be had. Potatoes are largely cultivated by Mr. Postle, of Colney, and with great success, as he has explained in the Farmers' Magazine; perhaps on the large scale on which he uses them, they would answer his purpose still better, if he erected some simple and cheap apparatus for steaming them; Mr. Curwen has done this with astonishing advantage. Cabbages on a rich deep soil are extremely productive-they are subject to few diseases, and resist frost very well, but they are not an article of general culture, because they require so rich and deep a soil, and because also, they are an exhausting crop-the turniprooted cabbage was successfully cultivated by the first sir Thomas Beevor, of Hethel, who was one of the first to recommend, if he did not in fact introduce the mangel wurzel into Norfolk. On the culture and properties of both these plants, he published several articles in the papers of the Bath Agricultural Society, nearly fifty years ago. The extension of the latter root, in consequence of the uncertainty in being able to raise the turnip, has been very great within these last few years—it has some advantages over the turnip, but the balance is not decidedly in its favour-the fly and the grub, both so destructive to the turnip, do not annoy it; so that it is not a very precarious crop to manage,