Various

“ In vain does she coax, caress, and insidiously flatter; the millions hold out. But she knows how to turn the delay to profit, by using it to acquire a thorough knowledge of the weak points of the fortress. With her astuteness, she is not long in penetrating the inmost recesses of the cloth-merchant's little soul. This done, she distributes her snares accordingly. And soon a day comes when, at the close of a long and interesting tête-à-tête, in the cool shrubberies of La Trélade, the spider and the fly go upon their several ways rejoicing. ”

“ They know that, over a large proportion of the arable soil of the kingdom, rent cannot so fall without being insufficient to meet the present burdens on land, and the great outlay required to maintain the farm-buildings, and to liquidate the other innumerable demands made on the proprietor of the soil. You call loudly for liberal covenants, for expensive buildings, and for more drainage, and at the very time you are depriving the proprietor of the means, and crippling him in his finances. Falling rents, farmers may well know, are the certain index of a retrograde agriculture ”

“ As a sample of Blackwood's statistics, take Mr Dudgeon's. He grows, on an average of years, 33 bushels wheat per acre, 40 bushels barley, 48 bushels oats. Could the Tamworth baronet 450 take this as a proof of decaying husbandry? As an average produce for a series of years, on a farm of 500 acres "of useful land," would Mr Huxtable himself think this evidence of an agricultural decline? But how are the Auchness statistics to dispel the gloomy impression regarding the moribund state of agriculture in North Britain, which, you say, has been created by Blackwood's statistics? ”

“ The theory is false which separates beauty from sublimity. The wing of the eagle is not less graceful than that of the smallest bird which flutters from bough to bough, or from flower to flower; nor is his flight less smooth, in his stormy altitudes, than the slow sailing of unruffled swans in their peaceful element. And as the pleasure attendant upon distinct and melodious language is of itself of the calm and graceful order, so also some degree of calmness and self-possession should pervade the mind of the poet who is to produce it for us. ”

“ Delay or refuse the possession of real power to these important parts of the British dominions, and you only aggravate existing discontent, and accelerate approaching dismemberment. To suppose you can now alleviate Irish suffering by quadrupling its electors, and stifle Colonial discontent by giving them local parliaments, is as absurd as if it had been proposed to still the storm of indignation raised in all the manufacturing towns of Great Britain by the suffering consequent on the contraction of the Currency, by giving the complainers all votes for their respective town-councils. ”

“ Can it be supposed that a plain, unambitious policy of merely exchanging productions with other nations will raise her, or keep her, above her natural level? No! she must use her subtilty to overreach other nations, and her energy and courage to maintain her superiority; and then, with war and overreaching, away goes Free Trade. If courage, energy, and subtilty are laid aside, England sinks, as I said, to a fifth-rate power, because her natural resources are less than those of other nations; and, by Free Trade, she shall teach those who do not know their own resources how to find their value. ”

“ As times go, and as poets write, Mr Bailey is remarkable for the plenitude of his faith, and the piety of his verse. We would only, if it were possible, take from his hands certain edged tools which he is playing with too fantastically, and the due command of which he does not seem to have acquired. We would merely express our regret that views which have been dictated by, or are in accordance with, the highest sentiments and aspirations of the human mind, should not have been rendered more harmonious with themselves—more distinct, consistent, and intelligible. ”

“ It is said that Free Trade, though it has been in operation for three years and a-half, has not had a fair trial; the Irish famine, the failure of £15,000,000 worth of produce out of £30,000,000 worth in a single year, did all the mischief. Be it so. Let Free Trade have a fair trial. Let the shopkeepers see what benefit they are likely practically to gain by the ruin of their customers. They have the Government in their hands, because they have the appointment of a majority in the House of Commons. ”

“ I hate your party; I never disguised that fact. I have always detested your political sect; there is no sympathy possible between the Levraults and M. de Chambord. If you had not assured me—if I had not believed, that your son would give in his adhesion to the present dynasty, I would never have given him my daughter and a third of my fortune. I relied on your good faith, and you have shamefully deceived me."
Whilst M. Levrault pronounced these last sentences, Gaston, who had come in from his ride, was standing at the open door of the drawing-room, pale, motionless, and silent. ”

“ Had British farmers, the growers of the nation's food, persisted after 1846, and in face of Parliamentary instructions, in growing the potato—not to the extent grown at Auchness, but to the extent to which they themselves grew it formerly—they would have deserved to have been cognosced and sent to Bedlam. Your agricultural economy is undeniably, in this respect, retrogressive; and its tendency, if generally adopted, is to plunge our country into the abyss of Irish misery. And yet you write magniloquently about the production of bread-stuffs and food for the people! ”

“ Blackwood spoke of you with a studied gentleness, as if unwilling to hurt your feelings; and Blackwood's farmers make not the remotest reference to you, and never once mention your name. And yet, in your High Farming Vindicated, you pour out on these gentlemen an inky flood of petulant impertinence. You speak of their statistics as "counter-statements" (p. 7.) to yours. Your vanity makes you think so. They never once allude to you; and if the article in Blackwood brought them to bear on the high farming theory, it might surely be the high farming of Mechi or Huxtable, as well as of Caird. ”

“ It may be that, like all men of genius, you are only before the age. In your present persecutions you may be only paying the penalty of your genius, and what the greatest benefactors of the human race have ever had to endure. Posterity will be more just, and give you your award when the ephemeral Blackwood shall have perished and been forgotten. ”

“ Well, she may survive all this, and, perhaps, be happier within her natural bounds; but she cannot be a great nation; and she has to choose between her present greatness and an uncertain prospect of humbler content, to which she must wade amidst blood and social commotion. But will she be allowed to enjoy that humbler contentment? Will not ambition stir other nations, when they find their power to oppress her? ”

“ We need not be surprised at the vast importance which has been attached to Blackwood's statistics, and at the countless and futile attempts which have been made, by those hostile to the interests of British agriculture, to contradict and deny their accuracy. How very different is your case! You give a solitary instance of a farm farmed by the factor of the estate, under a covenant so unboundedly liberal that it leaves the tenant to do anything he pleases, if he pays a moderate, in fact, a low rent for the ground. ”

“ Had her mother lived, doubtless she would have succeeded in developing the precious germs that pride had stifled. Left too early to herself, Laura had neglected, as useless plants, all her good qualities, and had cultivated only her defects. It were unjust not to add that she had more accomplishments than most young girls of her age. Constantly depreciated by her companions, she had neglected nothing that might raise her above them. She was a good musician, and painted landscapes with as much skill as can he expected from an artist who has never studied nature. ”

“ It is certain that the reduction of rent requisite to effect your avowed object, must infallibly effect a revolution in the structure of society, and entail upon our country a train of sufferings unheard of and unparalleled. It is most creditable to the discernment and patriotism of your brother farmers, that they reject, as a permanent cure for their difficulties, the lowering of rent, so as to turn their present loss into profit. ”

“ There never was such a purely gambling speculation in agriculture! The experiment was condemned by all but universal experience. No calculation of probabilities warranted the trial; and prudence repudiated the attempt. Nevertheless, the factor at Auchness bravely runs the risk, and stakes his £1200 upon the throw. The capricious root finds some peculiar virtue in the antiseptic moss of Auchness, to be found in no other soil, and flourishes in all its pristine vigour. The factor adventures again and again, and fortune smiles upon him. ”

“ By their rules, the half of the population ought to have been starved long ago; and if the produce of the country has in any degree kept pace with the increase of its population, we are not indebted for it to them," (p. 16.) To whom, then, are you indebted? Not to the Auchness husbandry, which is a prodigy of yesterday's growth—not to Mr M'Culloch and his attendant satellite; for it is only six months since these luminaries appeared in the western hemisphere. You are indebted, and could be indebted, for the result, to no other parties but Blackwood's farmers and their contemporaries. ”

“ If this system is continued for half a century more, it may reasonably be expected to lead, as it has done in France, to the introduction of universal suffrage. When everything is so cheapened that one-half of the population is landed in the workhouses, it is thought, everything will be righted, wisdom at once imprinted on the measures of Government, and contentment diffused through the country, by the paupers rising from their straw mattresses to vote for the Liberal candidates in ballot-boxes put up at the corners of every street. ”

“ Lower the rent—bring it down to zero, if need be—and thus convert the tenant's loss by Free Trade into a profit. Most preposterous is it for the nation to be pestered with these Protection meetings, and to be disturbed by the agricultural depression, with so ready a remedy lying at the door. Agricultural distress flies the kingdom, simply by changing the figure of the rent. When once divulged, we wonder that we did not ourselves discover the grand truth. ”

“ The Spirit of Evil reveals to Festus all manner of profound knowledge, metaphysical and theological; carries him up into heaven, where he learns that his own name is written in the Book of Life; conveys him through all space, into the sun, the planets, hell, Hades, and even invests him with the privilege of ubiquity; performs, in short, every service which so potent a spirit could render to an ambitious mortal. ”

“ The practical agriculturists of the kingdom have made up their mind upon the practicability and general utility of your schemes; and, while frankly allowing that much remains to be done for the further advancement of agriculture, and that high farming, in any profitable or practicable sense, is indispensable, they unanimously repudiate the utopianism of your theory as a cure for the dire evils into which, by no fault of their own, they have been plunged. ”

“ With admirable coolness, you look forward to the time when "some legislation or conventional provision" for unexhausted improvements will come to the farmer's relief. The farmers of the nation are suffering deeply; their capital is rapidly vanishing: with three years of the present prices, rents, and leases, the majority of them will be ruined. And you look forward to the remote future, when the possible legislation of Parliament, or some conventional arrangements enacted by some little college of agriculturists that may meet at Glasgow, will cure the evil. ”

“ Such arguments and topics were never heard of in Great Britain till the Reform Bill gave one class in society, viz. the urban shopkeepers, the command of the British Empire. We acknowledge one only interest in the whole community, and that is the interest of all classes; we acknowledge one only family—that is, the whole British people. Their real interests are, and ever must be, the same. It is impossible, in one community, that one great interest can be suffering while others are thriving. ”

“ Were it not for these abrupt and brief, but undoubted displays of genius, we certainly should not be induced to notice a work which so often degenerates into a mere poetic rant, a mere farrago of distracted metaphors, and crude metaphysics, and bewildering theology; where reasoning and imagination both run riot together; where the logic is as insane as the maniac fancy that is dancing with its flaring torch about it. ”

“ And you add, that "the average agriculture of Scotland has undoubtedly been improved by it." And it is with such absurd and solemn see-saw that you enlighten the agricultural world. If a rotation of crops has improved the average agriculture of Scotland, that demonstrates the excellence and necessity of the system. It is average results that anything deserving the name of a system can alone secure. Agricultural reformer as you are, I would respectfully suggest that you must, if you wish to effect any good, legislate for an average measure of agricultural character and skill. ”

“ You wonder that Mr Gibson of Woolmet, "commanding a metropolitan market, so little appreciates the advantages and necessities of his position that, instead of raising vegetable produce for that market," he persists in growing grain. Your wonder is the daughter of ignorance. You seem not to be aware of what is notorious, that there is already more ground cultivated by market-gardeners than is required to supply the citizens of Edinburgh. ”