23 Decr 1801

Maximum

Ulteriora

2

The grand efficient cause of agricultural encrease is the consolidation of small

landed properties and small farms. By selling his estate to a /an already/

wealthy neighbour, a man who is starving upon a farm of £30 or £35 a year of his

own, may obtain such a capital, as in a farm of profitable size, would place him

at once in a state of affluence. A farm of £250 or £200 a year may thus be

brought into the most improved and highest state of culture. It is in this way

that small farms are gradually consolidated into large, the quantity of the

national agricultural produce encreased together with the quantity /mass/ of

population deriving sustenance from that produce, to the unspeakable advantage

of all parties interested, amidst the cries /lamentations/ of so many wolves in

sheep’s cloathing, and /mixed with/ sheep in their own cloathing, who cry /never

cease crying/ out oppression and depopulation of so many idle lookers on who

draw pictures of agricultural oppression and depopulation, copied, if they are

to be believed from this universally /truly prosperous and universally/

enriching and beneficial state of things. So far, so good: but the progress of

this state of things is retarded by the impediments we have seen. Some centuries

may yet elapse, before they are compleatly surmounted, and the whole of the

culturable surface brought in consequence into the highest state of culture.

Meantime capital employd in manufactures encreases without stint, and with it

growing wealth and population beyond the incomes of home-bred sustenance.

[marginal insertion:] Two factors are of course dropped in this picture: the

consent of him who parts with his small property, and the beneficial equivalent,

by the consideration of which that consent was produced.