hearty love of justice compels him indeed in many instances to state results and expound views that he but faintly attempts to reconcile with sentiments elsewhere expressed. There is a poverty in his defence of the religious theory adopted by him, and a strength in his frank acknowledgments of the obligations we are under to the Church, that leave an impression by no means hostile towards one who yet totally and radically opposes every vestige of authority to a visible Church. He is consistent, and sublimates his own theories till they amount to a confession of more value to his opponents than his friends: thus he refines true Christian worship to such a spiritual and intellectual service, that he is obliged to throw over Calvin and Luther alike, as, after all, not being Apostles. The aesthetic principle he repudiates to an extent that will gain few admirers, and perhaps only suggest the consideration whether there may not be some truth in his assertion, that there is no mean between his idea of spiritual worship and a tangible belief in a visible Church, called by him indeed popery, but equally applicable to our Church according to his views of faith and practice. He damages moreover the religious argument on the æsthetic principle, by the boldness with which he casts off the influence of the fine arts generally from being of any advantage to the human race. Architecture indeed he professes to admire, but exults in the inferiority of English public buildings. Painting also he thinks good and estimable in its way, where Raphael is the artist: but any general application of taste and external beauty, as tending to elevate the mind, he discards as unworthy of any comparison with the smallest consideration of comfort, or even of being reconcileable with the habits of a people in any high state of civilisation. Music however is Mr. Laing's especial abhorrence: not even Beethoven can find a term of respect from him. The human animal somehow does not seem to thrive,' he says, 'upon the cup of coffee, the pipe of tobacco, the dolce far niente, and a sonata of Beethoven.' Even the humble attempt at music in the presbyterian Church of Scotland he condemns, consisting (and we cannot say we should much admire it ourselves) of each verse of a psalm being read and then sung without any regard to continuity of tune. Again and again he inveighs against music, and would grant but little occupation for the Hullah system if his social plans were carried out. Now this peculiar obliquity of Mr. Laing's mind arises first from his being a presbyterian, secondly from an innate deadness to any influence from external beauty himself, and thirdly from his hatred of Germans, who are musical, and otherwise given to the fine arts. We might also add that he belongs to a former school of education, when the arts were

NO. J.XIX.-N.S.

I

only considered as pretty playthings for idle people, but unworthy of practical men.

With this moral deficiency apparent in all that Mr. Laing says, his whole line of argument is generally sound, and his conclusions most valuable. One element indeed is wanting, but he so far gives us the idea of himself feeling this want, of leaving a vacancy in his scheme for something to fill, and of almost suggesting the true remedy, that next to the witness of a thorough Churchman we find most truth in him, and this book we suspect will be more referred to by the Church party than by his own fellow-presbyterians.

It is time, however, that we introduce a few definite subjects on which he gives us the benefit of his observations.

The foundation and object of the present work is to trace the effect of subdivision of land on the continent; and first he dwells on the advantages of this system as witnessed in Flanders, where we may look on it as an abstract question, unconnected with any great recent spoliation of Church or nobility, the land having been thus divided for many generations.

The argument in favour of small divisions of land, under peasant-proprietors, is the superior cultivation which is thus induced :

'Here, in Flanders, from Calais, by St. Omer, to Lisle, Belgium, and Prussia, a route as well known to English travellers as the road from London to York, the division of the land into small estates of working peasant-proprietors is painted upon the face of the country. The whole expanse is like a carpet, divided into small compartments of different shades and hues of green, according to the different crops of which each farmer has a little patch on his little estate. Two different kinds of crop may often be seen on one rig, or bed; and five or six acres together under one kind of crop, are not common. There being no hedges or inclosures, no grass fields for pasture, and no uncultivated corners or patches, the whole country looks like one vast bleach-field, covered with long webs of various colours and shades. The land is evidently divided into very small portions of property. The traveller cannot be mistaken in this observation. Now, as this state of property is of old standing here in Flanders, and not, as in the rest of France, an arrangement of recent date, what have been the results on the material condition of the people, or their agriculture, in the first place, on the amount of constant employment it affords them, on their numbers in proportion to their means of subsistence, on their food, lodging, clothing, on their moral and intellectual character? The condition of the people here must be the type of that to which the whole of Europe, excepting Great Britain, is tending, and which will be universal on the Continent in a few generations.'-P. 19,

The produce of this system is then described as follows:

Will any Scotch farmer, "of capital and skill," from the Lothians, venture to say that he has his farm of 200 or 300 acres in such good heart, in such a clean garden-like condition, so free from weeds, and carrying all over it such luxuriant crops, and producing so much food per

acre for man and beast, as an equal number of the acres now before me in this tract of country? Has any farmer in Scotland or England such crops of red clover, lucerne, and other green succession crops, as are now, in spring, being cut, or coming on for being cut, in succession, on these small patches of farms, for the summer stall-feeding of cattle in the house? There are no cattle in the fields, and no pasture-fields for them, in the ordinary course of husbandry, on these small estates. All are kept indoors, in summer as well as in winter; and all the land, not in grain crops, is under green crops, for their support. The fodder is cut and carried to the cattle, fresh, twice a-day, and the cutting and carrying employs the whole family. This stall-feeding of cattle all summer in-doors, and the saving thereby of the manure, which is the object of it, during six months of the year in which the manure is positively thrown away by our system of pasturage in fields of permanent, or of second or third year's sown grass, is a husbandry scarcely known among our large farmers. It may, indeed, be reasonably doubted if it would be practicable on a large farm. To cut and carry green fodder for half a dozen cattle, by the labour of the family, is an operation very different in expense from hiring labour to cut and carry the whole summer fodder of the cattle-stock of a large farm. In gardening and husbandry, and even in trade and manufactures, there are operations which are practicable and profitable on a small scale, but which would not be so on a great scale; and many answer well on a great scale, which would not answer at all in a small way.'-Pp. 20-22.

The question which next occurs after this comparison, is the ultimate purpose of land, and its obligation to support the various classes of a social community as well as to pay rent. If land is only looked upon as paying rent, that land of course which cannot pay rent is left uncultivated, though still it might support a population without that charge upon their labours :

'What cannot afford rent to the landlord, and profit to the tenant, as well as a subsistence to the labourer, cannot be taken into cultivation at all, until the better sort of land becomes so scarce that the inferior must be resorted to, and, from the scarcity and consequent dearness of the better, can afford a rent and profit also. This appears to be the glimmering of meaning in the foggy theory of rent given us by our great political economists. They forget that God Almighty did not create the land for the purpose of paying rents to country gentlemen, and profits to gentlemen farmers, but to subsist mankind by their labour upon it; and that a very large proportion of the land of this world, which never could be made to feed the labourers on it, and to yield besides a surplus of produce affording rent and profits to another class, could very well subsist the labourers, and in a comfortable civilised way too, if that were all it had to do. It could produce to them food, fuel, clothing, lodging, or value equivalent to these requirements of civilised subsistence, but could not produce a surplus for rent, and profit, over and above their own civilised subsistence.'-Pp. 25, 26.

Our author's freedom in discussing Caledonian virtue and wisdom is entertaining, and shall tell its own tale to our readers in the following extract:—

What a cackling and braying, some forty years ago, at agricultural dinners, farmers' clubs, and county meetings, about Scotch farming! From Thursowater to the river Trent, the land resounded with the praises

of Scotch farming, Scotch leases, and Scotch rents. The Sir Johns and Sir Josephs of those days, with a board of agriculture at their tails, were flapping their wings and screaming with delight at the vast improvements to be effected by the Scotch system of land-letting and farming. If printed paper were as good to lay upon land as bone-dust or guano,-and probably it may,- -a large proportion of the arable land of the united kingdoms might have been top-dressed with agricultural reports, transactions of the honourable board, farmers' journals, and treatises on Scotch husbandry. Improving is one thing, improvement is another; and the two do not always run together abreast, or follow each other in tandem. What has been the improvement, what the benefit to the great mass of the people of Scotland, by this improving? Rents, it will at once be answered, have been doubled, trebled, quadrupled, since it began, some sixty years ago; and as the large farmers, or tenants of adequate capital and skill, who pay those increased rents, are also making greater profits, as well as their landlords higher rents, it is evident that the land is now sending greater quantities of food to market, that there is a corresponding improvement, in short, in the productiveness of the land; and Swift or Burke has told us, that he is a benefactor of mankind, and has accomplished a great improvement for society. who makes two ears of corn grow where only one grew before. But softly. Let us examine this proposition. What is pithily said is not therefore necessarily true. One should be always on his guard against these well-said and pithily expressed sayings. Unless in mathematics and religion, there is no squeezing a general truth into the nut-shell of an axiom. Swift or Burke, or whoever said it, forgot, that unless those who raise the two ears of corn can also eat them, or enjoy, at least, a part and portion in them, it is no improvement in their condition, and they are the great mass of the population of a country, but only a benefit and improvement to the small body of landowners, and great tenants, to whom the corn belongs.'-Pp. 26, 27.

The fruits of this system are then canvassed :

'Scotland has now enjoyed, for more than half a century, this improving process; and what is called the Scotch system of land-letting, and farming, has extended over the whole country. What has been the improvement, physical or moral, in the condition of the great mass of her population? Rents of land, it is true, have doubled, trebled, quadrupled; and the agricultural population being driven into the towns,-Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paisley, Greenock, Dundee, Aberdeen,-have doubled, trebled, quadrupled. The aggregate population of these six towns alone has risen, since 1801, from 262,274 souls, to 665,967 in 1841. Are not these towns great social excrescences in a country with only 2,620,000 inhabitants? In 1841 it was reckoned that there were only 141,243 families employed in agriculture, which, at four and a half persons for each family, would amount to an agricultural population, in all Scotland, of 636,093 persons, or somewhat less than the population of six of her towns. Is this a sound and wholesome distribution of employment and population in a country? Is it from want of land that so few families are subsisted by agricultural employment? The total area of Scotland is estimated at 20,586,880 acres, of which 9,039,930 are considered not susceptible of cultivation, being lakes, mountain-tops, rocks, &c.; and of the remaining 11,546,950 acres, 5,485,000 acres are cultivated, and 6,061,950 acres are uncultivated, the latter, however, yielding rent and profit, as sheep-farms, shooting-grounds, or deer-preserves, although not yielding employment and subsistence, aš in former times, when the Highlands were a peopled country. There appears to be but one family employed in Scotland on every eighty-two

acres of the land capable of cultivation, and only one employed for every thirty-nine acres of the actually cultivated land. The great question here belongs to a higher science than political economy-to social philosophy. It is not whether more or better agricultural produce is sent to market by the one system than by the other, but whether it be a better social arrangement for the permanent well-being of a nation, that six hundred thousand only, of a population of two millions and a half, should be employed on the cultivation of the land of a country, and the rest of the mass of its working population be dependent, for the means to buy subsistence, on the manufacture and sale of cotton, iron, and other goods, for distant, foreign, and uncertain markets; or whether it would be a better arrangement of society, that the land of the country should employ and subsist the mass of its inhabitants, and only the smaller proportion be altogether dependent for employment, and food, on the sale, in the foreign or even in the home market, of the products of their work.'-Pp. 35, 36.

The moral condition of the Scotch here comes in for a few remarks, and a calculation is given of the quantity of whisky consumed during that day on which religious Edinburgh' allows no railway travelling, and protests against any work in the post-office. We will state this calculation in our own form; reckoning that 10,000l., or thereabouts, would liberally build and tolerably endow a church not unworthy of the capital of the north; Edinburgh might do this month by month, if its inhabitants would deposit their Sunday drinking money in a fund for this purpose. The population of Scotland is 2,620,184, and consumes 5,595,186 gallons of spirits, while England with her 15,000,000, only consumes one third more.

The two systems of farming are compared with respect to the inhabitants they support, by taking an instance of a certain quantity of land in each case. It is calculated, that in East Lothian, 1600 acres would support in the first place a landed proprietor of 4,000l. a year: (high rent according to English notions!) then eight farmers, each of whom would employ on the whole what would amount to ten labourers, although even this with no regularity. The Flanders side of the picture is stated thus:

'Here the whole 1600 acres must be in garden-farms of five or six acres; and it is evident that in the amount of produce from the land, in the crops of rye, wheat, barley, rape, clover, lucerne, and flax for clothing material, which are the usual crops, the 1600 acres, under such_gardenculture, surpass the 1600 acres under large-farm cultivation, however good, as much as a kitchen-garden surpasses in productiveness a common field. On the 1600 acres here in Flanders, or Belgium, instead of eight farmers with their eighty farm-servants, there will be from 300 to 320 families, or from 1400 to 1600 individuals, each family working its own piece of land, and with some property in cows, sheep, pigs, utensils, and other stock in proportion to their land, and with constant employment and a secure subsistence on their own little estates.'-P. 39.

Many difficulties, however, occur to this system of division; nor is the question a practical one in the sense of having any