It has been remarked by Sir James Mackintosh, that there are four great works, in four distinct departments of knowledge, which have more visibly and extensively influenced opinion than any other productions of the human intellect. The first of these is the Treatise on the Law of War and Peace, by Grotius. It appeared about two centuries ago; and from that period downwards, international law became a solid fact, which all civilised countries have recognised, and which even the French Convention, during the Reign of Terror, dared, in its madness, to outrage but for a moment. The second is the Essay on the Human Understanding, by Locke. It struck down, as with the blow of a hatchet, the wretched mental philosophy of the dark ages,––that philosophy which Puseyism, in its work of diffusing over the present the barbarism and ignorance of the past, would so fain revive and restore, and which has been ever engaged, as its proper employment, in imparting plausibility to error and absurdity, and in furnishing apology for crime. The third was the Spirit of Laws, by Montesquieu. It placed legislation on the basis of philosophy; and straightway law began to spring up among the nations out of a new soil. The fourth and last great work––An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith––was by far the most influential of them all. ‘It is,’ says Sir James, ‘perhaps the only book which produced an immediate, general, and irrevocable change in some of the most 191 important parts of the legislation of all civilised states. Touching those matters which may be numbered, and measured, and weighed, it bore visible and palpable fruit. In a few years it began to alter laws and treaties, and has made its way throughout the convulsions of revolution and conquest to a due ascendant over the minds of men, with far less than the average obstructions of prejudice and clamour, which check the channels through which truth flows into practice.’

And yet, though many of the seeds which this great work served to scatter sprung up thus rapidly, and produced luxuriant crops, there were others, not less instinct with the vital principles, of which the germination has been slow. The nurseryman expects, in sowing beds of the stone-fruit-bearing trees, such as the plum or the hawthorn, to see the plants spring up very irregularly. One seed bursts the enveloping case, and gets up in three weeks; another barely achieves the same work in three years. And it has been thus with the harder-coated germens of the Wealth of Nations. It is now exactly eighty years since the philosopher set himself to elaborate the thinking of his great work in his mother’s house in Kirkcaldy, and exactly seventy years since he gave it to the world. It appeared in 1776; and now, for the first time, in 1846, the Queen’s Speech, carefully concocted by a Conservative Ministry, embodies as great practical truths its free-trade principles. The shoot––a true dicotyledon––has fairly got its two vigorous lobes above the surface: freedom of trade in all that the farmer rears, and freedom of trade in all that the manufacturer produces; and there cannot be a shadow of doubt that it will be by and by a very vigorous tree. No Protectionist need calculate, from its rate of progress in the past, on its rate of progress in the future. Nearly three generations have come and gone since, to vary the figure, the preparations for laying the train began; but now that 192 the train is fairly ready and fired, the explosion will not be a matter of generations at all. Explosions come under an entirely different law from the law of laying trains. It will happen with the rising of the free-trade agitation as with the rising of water against a dam-head stretched across a river. Days and weeks may pass, especially if droughts have been protracted and the stream low, during which the rising of the water proves to be a slow, silent, inefficient sort of process, of half-inches and eighth-parts; but when the river gets into flood,––when the vast accumulation begins to topple over the dam-dyke,––when the dyke itself begins to swell, and bulge, and crack, and to disgorge, at its ever-increasing flaws and openings, streams of turbid water,––let no one presume to affirm that the after-process is to be slow. In mayhap one minute more, in a few minutes at most, stones, sticks, turf, the whole dam-dyke, in short, but a dam-dyke no longer, will be roaring adown the stream, wrapped up in the womb of an irresistible wave. Now there have been palpable openings, during the last few months, in the Protectionist dam-head. We pointed years since to the rising of the water, and predicted that it would prevail at last. But the droughts were protracted, and the river low. Good harvests and brisk trade went hand in hand together; and the Protectionist dam-head––though feeble currents and minute waves beat against it, and the accumulation within rose by half-inches and eighth-parts––stood sure. But the river is now high in flood––the waters are toppling over––the yielding masonry has begun to bulge and crack. The Queen’s Speech, when we consider it as emanating from a Conservative Ministry, indicates a tremendous flaw; the speech of Sir Robert Peel betrays an irreparable bulge; the sudden conversions to free-trade principles of officials and place-holders show a general outpouring at opening rents and crannies: depend on it, Protectionists, your dam-dyke, patch or prop it as 193 you please, is on the eve of destruction; yet a very little longer, and it will be hurtling down the stream.

For what purpose, do we say? Simply in the hope of awakening to a sense of their true interest, ere it be too late, a class of the Scottish people in which we feel deeply interested,––we mean the tenant agriculturists of the kingdom. They have in this all-important crisis a battle to fight; and if they do not fight and win it, they will be irrevocably ruined by hundreds and thousands. The great Protectionist battle––the battle in which they may make common cause with their landlords if they will, against the League, and the Free-Trade Whigs, and Sir Robert Peel, and Adam Smith, and the Queen––is a battle in which to a certainty they will be beat. They may protract the contest long enough to get so thoroughly wearied as to be no longer fit for the other great battle which awaits them; but they may depend on it as one of the surest things in all the future, that they will have to record a disastrous issue. They must be defeated. We would fain ask them––for it is sad to see men spending their strength to no end––to look fairly at the aspect things are beginning to wear, and the ever-extending front which is arraying against them. We would ask them first to peruse those chapters in Adam Smith which in reality form the standing-ground of their opponents,––chapters whose solid basis of economic philosophy has made anti-corn-law agitation and anti-corn-law tracts and speeches such formidable things. We would ask them next to look at the progress of the League, at its half-million fund, its indomitable energy and ever-growing influence. We would then ask them to look at the recent conversions of Whig and Tory to free-trade principles, at the resignation of Sir Robert Peel, and the proof the country received in consequence, that in the present extremity there is no other pilot prepared to take the helm; at the strangely marked Adam Smith cast of the Queen’s 194 Speech; and at the telling facts of Sir Robert’s explanatory statement. We request them to take a cool survey of all these things, and to cogitate for themselves the issue which they so clearly foretell. It seems as certain that free-trade principles are at last to be established in Britain, as that there is a sun in the sky. Nor does there seem much wisdom in fighting a battle that is inevitably to be lost. The battle which it is their true interest to be preparing to fight, is one in which they must occupy the ground, not of agriculturists, but simply of tenants: it is a battle with the landlords, not with the free-traders.

We believe Dr. Chalmers is right in holding that, ultimately at least, the repeal of the corn-laws will not greatly affect the condition of our agriculturists. There is, however, a transition period from which they have a good deal to dread. The removal of the protective duties on meat and wool has not had the effect of lowering the prices of either; but the fear of such an effect did for a time what the repeal of the duties themselves failed to do, and bore with disastrous consequences on the sheep and cattle market. And such a time may, we are afraid, be anticipated on the abolition of the corn-laws. Nay, it is probable that, even when the transition state shall be over, there will be a general lowering of price to the average of that of the Continent and America,––an average heightened by little more than the amount of the true protective duties of the trade,––the expense of carriage from the foreign farm to the British market. And woe to the poor tenant, tied down by a long lease to a money-rent rated according to the average value of grain under the protective duties, if the defalcation is to fall on him! If he has to pay the landlord according to a high average, and to be paid by the corn-factor according to a low one, he is undone. And his real danger in the coming crisis indicates his proper battle. It is not with his old protector Sir Robert that he should be preparing 195 to fight; it is, we repeat, with his old ally the landholder. Nay, he will find, ultimately at least, that he has no choice in the matter. With Sir Robert he may fight if it please him, and fight, as we have shown, to be beaten; but with the landlord he must fight, whether he first enter the lists with Sir Robert or no. When his preliminary struggle shall have terminated unsuccessfully, he shall then without heart, without organization, without ally, have to enter on the inevitable struggle,––a struggle for very existence. We of course refer to landlords as a class: there are among them not a few individuals with whom the tenant will have no struggle to maintain,––conscientious men, at once able and willing to adjust their demands to the circumstances of the new state of things. But their character as a class does not stand so high. Many of their number are in straitened circumstances,––so sorely burdened with annuities and mortgages, as to be somewhat in danger of being altogether left, through the coming change, without an income; and it is not according to the nature of things that the case of the tenant should be very considerately dealt with by them. When a hapless crew are famishing on the open sea, and the fierce cannibal comes to be developed in the man, it is the weaker who are first devoured. Now we would ill like to see any portion of our Scotch tenantry at the mercy of wild, unreasoning destitution in the proprietor. We would ill like to see him vested with the power to decide absolutely in his own case, whether it was his tenant that was to be ruined, or he himself that was to want an income, knowing well beforehand to which side the balance would incline. Nor would we much like to see our tenantry at the mercy of even an average class of proprietors, by no means in the extreme circumstances of their poorer brethren, but who, with an unimpeachable bond in their hands, that enabled them to say whether it was they themselves or their tenant neighbours 196 who were to be the poorer in consequence of the induced change, would be but too apt, in accordance with the selfish bent of man’s common nature, to make a somewhat Shylock-like use of it. Stout men who have fallen into reduced circumstances, and stout paw-sucking bears in their winter lodgings, become gradually thin by living on their own fat; and quite right it is that gross men and corpulent bears should live on their own fat, just because the fat is their own. But we would not deem it right that our proprietors should live on their farmers’ fats: on the contrary, we would hold it quite wrong, and a calamity to the country; and such, at the present time, is the great danger to which the tenantry of Scotland are exposed. Justice imperatively demands, that if some such change is now to take place in the value of farms, as that which took place on the regulation of the currency in the value of money, the ruinous blunder of 1819 should not be repeated. It demands that their actual rent be not greatly increased through the retention of the merely nominal one; that the tenant, in short, be not sacrificed to a term wholly unchanged in sound, but altogether altered in value. And such, in reality, is the object for which the farm-holding agriculturists of Scotland have now to contend. It is the only quarrel which they can prosecute with a hope of success.

We referred, in a recent number, when remarking on the too palpable unpopularity of the Whigs, to questions which, if animated by a really honest regard for the liberties of the subject, they might agitate, and grow strong in agitating, secure of finding a potent ally in the moral sense of the country. One of these would involve the emancipation of the tenantry of England, now sunk, through one of the provisions of the Reform Bill, into a state of vassalage and political subserviency without precedent since at least the days of Henry VIII. It has been well remarked by Paley, 197 that the direct consequences of political innovations are often the least important; and that it is from the silent and unobserved operation of causes set at work for different purposes, that the greatest revolutions take their rise. ‘Thus,’ he says, ‘when Elizabeth and her immediate successor applied themselves to the encouragement and regulation of trade by many wise laws, they knew not that, together with wealth and industry, they were diffusing a consciousness of strength and independency which could not long endure, under the forms of a mixed government, the dominion of arbitrary princes.’ And again: ‘When it was debated whether the Mutiny Act––the law by which the army is governed and maintained––should be temporal or perpetual, little else probably occurred to the advocates of an annual bill, than the expediency of retaining a control over the most dangerous prerogative of the Crown––the direction and command of a standing army; whereas, in its effect, this single reservation has altered the whole frame and quality of the British constitution. For since, in consequence of the military system which prevails in neighbouring and rival nations, as well as on account of the internal exigencies of Government, a standing army has become essential to the safety and administration of the empire, it enables Parliament, by discontinuing this necessary provision, so to enforce its resolutions upon any other subject, as to render the king’s dissent to a law which has received the approbation of both Houses, too dangerous an experiment any longer to be advised.’ And thus the illustration of the principle runs on. We question, however, whether there be any illustration among them more striking than that indirect consequence of the Reform Bill on the tenantry of England to which we refer. The provision which conferred a vote on the tenant-at-will, abrogated leases, and made the tiller of the soil a vassal. The farmer who precariously holds his farm from year to year cannot, 198 of course, be expected to sink so much capital in the soil, in the hope of a distant and uncertain return, as the lessee certain of a possession for a specified number of years; but some capital he must sink in it. It is impossible, according to the modern system, or indeed any system of husbandry, that all the capital committed to the earth in winter and spring should be resumed in the following summer and autumn. A considerable overplus must inevitably remain to be gathered up in future seasons; and this overplus remainder, in the case of the tenant-at-will, is virtually converted into a deposit, lodged in the hands of the landlord, to secure the depositor’s political subserviency and vassalage. Let him but once manifest a will and a mind of his own, and vote, in accordance with his convictions, contrary to the will of the landlord, and straightway the deposit, converted into a penalty, is forfeited for the offence. It is surely not very great Radicalism to affirm that a state of things so anomalous ought not to exist––that the English tenant should be a freeman, not a serf––and that he ought not to be bound down by a weighty penalty to have no political voice or conscience of his own. The simple principle of ‘No lease, no vote,’ would set all right; and it is a principle which so recommends itself to the moral sense as just, that an honest Whiggism would gain, in agitating its recognition and establishment, at once strength and popularity. But there are few Scotch tenants in the circumstances of vassalage so general in England. They are in circumstances in which they at least may act independently; and the time is fast coming in which they must either make a wise, unbiassed use of their freedom, or be hopelessly crushed for ever.

January 28, 1846.