traced to our system of the laws relating to land; but the economical part of the question he has grasped most completely, and supported by most able and practical reasoning.

We must, we suppose, look for the text of the work, not where the text is usually found, but at the end. The following sentence, which is almost the concluding one, may be taken as the leading proposition of the work:

"A powerful and widely-ramified aristocracy like that of England, not resting for support on any oppressive laws, and enjoying no privileges but which are for the public advantage, is necessary to give stability and security to the government, and freedom to the people. And our laws in regard to succession being well fitted to maintain such an aristocracy, and, at the same time, to inspire every other class with the full spirit of industry and enterprise, to change them would not be foolish merely, but criminal,—a lèse majesté against the public interests."-P. 172.

It must not, however, be supposed from this remark, that any portion of the work is appropriated to a set defence of government by means of an aristocracy. By an aristocracy we mean the deposition of political power in the hands of men of leisure and education, as opposed to the tendency of the Reform Bill, to transfer the governing functions to the "practical" men of the trading and moneyed interests, and the analogous claims of Chartism, founded on Jack Cade's complaint, that the "king's council are no good workmen." In England, we are pretty sure to have an aristocracy—that is, the influences which affect government and legislation will emanate principally from that class which is socially at the head of the nation; and the question is, whether we are to have a mere moneyed aristocracy, or one qualified by those mixed and undefinable conditions which, more than anything else, act to keep down the growing and eager ascendency of wealth per se. Among the safeguards of such an aristocracy as we have described, not the least powerful is to be found in the laws discussed in the work before us. Mr. M'Culloch, as we have said, assumes the importance to the country of preserving the present characteristics of British aristocracy; and he therefore

proceeds at once to show how the laws on which he treats operate for this preservation, and to rebut the objections advanced against them on the score of their relations to other classes of the community.

One of the most frequent of these objections is, that the laws in question tend to diminish the productiveness of the land, and thereby inflict a serious injury on the community at large; that they prevent, in many instances, the landlord from granting leases to his tenant beyond the term of his own life; that the tenant, in consequence, is not willing to incur the outlay of drainage and other expensive improvements, because he is not secured by a lease; while the landlord, on the other hand, will not enter into these expenses, because he does not feel the same interest in his limited estate which he would in the unconditional fee-simple.

Note first of all the logic of this not spend his money in draining withargument. The tenant, it seems, will out a lease. As, however, a lease would suffice to induce him so to do, we might naturally suppose that the landlord's estate for life, or in tail, would be at least an equal inducement. These reasoners, however, aver, that the landlord is only to be tempted by the unrestricted fee. cording to this progressive scale, it might be fairly argued, that the tenant, on becoming lessee for years, would still require the landlord's life-interest; and the latter, when seized of the fee, would decline the requisite expense, except on a guarantee of immortality, and justify himself by Horace's au

thority,

"Tanquam

Ac

Sit proprium quidquam puncto quod mobilis horæ Permutet dominos, et cedat in altera jura."

But the general scope of an argument may be just, though clumsily stated and fallaciously supported. We are, however, at no loss for experiments on the largest scale whereby to test the theory here noticed. We have English agriculture, subjected to a limited law of entail, contrasted on the one hand with Scottish agriculture, under a law of perpetual entail, and on the other with that of France and its compulsory gavelkind.

Mr. M'Culloch has taken an elaborate view of the question in its relation to the tillage of the soil in these three countries respectively, more especially in France. We find, from the result of his investigation, that,

"The average produce per acre of the crops of wheat in England and Wales in good years, has been carefully estimated at thirty-two bushels an acre, and it is certainly not under thirty bushels. But in France the produce of wheat, even in the richest and best cultivated departments, is little more according to the official returns and the best private authorities, than twenty bushels an acre; and at an average of the entire kingdom, it hardly amounts in a good year to four teen bushels. This result is completely

decisive. It shows that one acre of land in England yields, from its being better farmed, considerably more wheat than two acres in France and if we took barley or oats, turnips, beef, or wool, for a standard, the difference in our favour would be seen to be still greater.

If labour were taken for a standard in

stead of land, the result would be still

more in our favour. One man and one

horse in England produce more corn and other agricultural produce than three men and three horses in France. Labour in the latter is misapplied and

wasted."-P. 117.

Again:

So much for the comparison of French and English agriculture. Let us now turn to Scotland ::

"In an Appendix to the 'Sketches of the History of Man,' published in 1774, Lord Kames says, 'The quantity of land that is locked up in Scotland by entails has damped the growing spirit of agriculture. There is not produced sufficiency of corn at home for our consumption; and our condition will become worse and worse by new entails, till agriculture and industry be annihilated.' Now the extent of land under entail in Scotland has been certainly more than doubled, perhaps more than trebled, since this paragraph was written, and yet agriculture and manufactures have made a more rapid pro

gress in Scotland in the interval, and especially during the last thirty years, when entails were most prevalent than in England or in any other country whatever."-P. 71.

Lord Kames, in this respect, seems to have had the same subtle ingenuity in prophesying counter to the event, as distinguishes Mr. Cobden.

The first part of Mr. M'Culloch's volume contains a cursory historical view of the earliest regulations of succession and inheritance. Thus, at p. 16, he traces the right of primogeniture, or preference of the eldest son, to the Mosaic law. We are far from maintaining that the specific details of the code promulgated on Sinai are a model of law for all nations; on the contrary, they were no doubt intended to be such as a wise human law-giver would frame, and consequently more or less applicable according to the changes and differences of social organization. But we do hold that these laws indicate to

mankind principles which are to be observed in all times and by all nations. Thus, the septennial release of debts, the return of every man to his possession in the year of jubilee, the prohibition of interest upon loans except to an alien, even the poor man's portion in the field and vineyard, may or may not be regulations adapted to a particular existing state of society.

But they enunciate a towards the poor and unfortunate, of principle of mercy and forbearance which, we fear, our political economists and commercial legislators are too apt to lose sight. In conformity with this view, when we hear the right of primogeniture assailed as contrary to the law of nature (by the way, where is this much-talked-of law of nature to be found?) we may safely appeal to the express recognition by the Jewish law of "the right of the first-born as the beginning of his father's strength," to show that the custom of primogeniture is at all events not repugnant to instinctive justice or the common-sense of mankind. The old Saxon law of gravelkind might be better adapted to a superabundance of land and a thin population; the preference of the youngest son, by the custom of Borough-English, might well prevail among the far progenitors of the