another. This being the case, it very naturally happened, that in all pecuniary transactions which had property in land for their subject, the calculations of value would be defalcated precisely to that amount which constituted the estimated value of the tithe; and as in process of time, all property in land had necessarily become the subject of vendition, the security of the tithe-owner's title would be augmented exactly in that degree that the land-owner had lost his apparent equity to a property for which he had never given a consideration. But a still more formidable fortification to the title of the tithe-owner was contained in another circumstance, which owed its existence to that which had been branded with the name of sacrilege. It might have been foreseen, that so long as that peculiar property which con+ stituted the Church's endowment, was exclusively enjoyed by ecclesiastical persons, in virtue of their fulfilling that particular character, and not by force of any civil acquisition, a door was open to the unembarrassed discussion of the expediency of mo difying or abolishing that property, in the same manner as the payment of any other class of public servants is discussed, and upon the unentangled principles of moral and political fitness. It had been a master-piece of policy, had it been brought about with that design, to have provided that the partial impoverishe ment of the Church should have wrought its permanent secu> vity, by implicating a portion, and that no inconsiderable one, of the peculiar property appropriated to its support, in the compli cated rights and interests created by unrestricted alienation, as a temporal inheritance. Without the machinations of the Church, however, and in defiance of its appeals, that event was effected; and tithes, in the form of lay-impropriations, having, after occa sional struggles, been established as a valid civil property, and recognised as such by the Legislature for nearly three centuries, the faith of the nation has been pledged to their support equally with that of any other lay inheritance; and the Church is now content to look to the spoliæ opimæ, as the basis of her security.

In the midst of the lulling repose of undisputed enjoyment, an occasion of renewed discussion has gradually sprung up, wholly unforeseen by any previous agitators of the subject, of a character altogether distinct from polemical disquisition, and most momentous to the interests of the country in a political point of -view. Those who have been unaccustomed to the consideration of questions of political economy, and who will be unprepared to anticipate consequences, will feel surprise at being told that the occasion of this renewed and anxious discussion was simply this, that the value of titles had been found to increase in an inordinate disproportion to that of land. This single fact, placed perhaps in different points of view, will be found to eontain the principle of nearly all the great evils alleged to arise

from the tithe laws, and on which Parliament has been so recently besought for relief. But in order to acquaint the uninitiated reader with the consequences of this fact, it is necessary to call before his attention the circumstances under which it has arisen. To those who are aware of the revolution which has taken place in modern times, in the principles of agriculture, it might be enough to remind them that the tithe, in its legal sense, is a tenth part of the GROSS produce of the land. In that single statement is contained the whole history of the grievance; but to save our readers the trouble of seeking for the inference, we will proceed to further elucidation.

When tithes were first introduced into this country, capital, as applied to agriculture, was almost, if not entirely, unknown. The land was either in a state of spontaneous pasture, or it was in tillage; and that tillage was the employment, not of hired labourers, requiring a stated capital for the payment of their wages, but of the inferior tenantry, as a part of their bounden duty. It is clear, then, that the gross produce and the net produce, would, with the slight exception of the expense of seed and farming utensils, be synonymous. A tithe of the gross produce, therefore, after deducting the expense of collecting and removing it, was about equivalent to a tithe of the net pro fit; or, in other words, to a tenth part of the income of the landowner, so far as that income was derived from the land. As the expense of cultivation gradually increased, the value of the tithe would of course surmount the value of a tenth of the net profit; because the same quantity of produce was taken, without making any proportional allowance for that part which was defalcated from the gross produce, to repay the money sunk in cultivation. Supposing, therefore, a sum, equal to one fourth of the value of the whole crop, to be expended in cultivation, the proportion of the tithe to the tenth of the net profit would necessarily be as one tenth of the whole to one tenth of three-fourths. The positive value of the tithe was not only increased because it was a tenth of the increased produce, but its relative value was increased because it was a property compounded of a tenth of the produce of the land, and a tenth of the profits of the capital sunk in cultivation. Again, taking the value of three fourths of the produce as the net profit of the cultivator, it is equally obvious, that in this state of culture the tithe owner takes a larger portion than a tenth of the income of the land owner, exactly in the degree that a tenth of the whole is larger than tenth of three fourths; that is to say, he takes two fifteenths, or something between a seventh and an eighth. If the reader will pursue this arithmetical process, he will find, that in proportion as the money expended in cultivation approaches nearer and nearer to the value of the produce, the discrepancy between the relative value of the gross tenth and the net profit, becomes

greater and greater, till at a certain point the whole profit is extinguished in the tithe.

Had England never become a great commercial country, the amount of this discrepancy would, in all probability, never have been of sufficient magnitude to have excited public solicitude or justified complaint. But the principle of the grievance, which had lain dormant and unnoticed for centuries, was at length called into action by a change of system originating almost wholly in commercial prosperity. The great principles of commerce, estimating a large and actively-employed capital as the foundation of wealth, found their way into agriculture; while the overflowings of commercial affluence afforded the means for putting those principles into practice. In the mean time, aided by the demand for human labour, occasioned by unlimited trade and manufactures, the population, and with it the consumption of agricultural produce, increased in a ratio which, while it operated as the most powerful stimulus to the agricul turist, seemed to mock his most vigorous efforts to provide for. It was then that the limits of the power of production possessed by the soil became a question of the first importance in political economy, and that agriculture was generally taken up as an organized science, by men standing foremost in the ranks of opulence and intelligence. The result is probably one of the grandest and most successful efforts of human power on a large scale, that the history of science records. To the united operations of SKILL and CAPITAL, it seemed as if nature herself had no powers of opposition: it was not bleakness, nor barrenness, nor exhaustion, nor poverty, that could oppose a barrier. The names of common, and waste, and moor, became almost forgotten. Small farms, with their small capitals and racking management, were consolidated into such tracts as afforded the capability for an improved system of husbandry, and a union of labour, skill, and capital; and by the invention and introduction of machinery, a momentum was given to the operations of labour, amounting almost to the imaginary processes of gnostic fiction, while by diminishing the expense of those operations, it enabled the grower to bring his produce to the market at a cheaper price*.

* The celebrated feat of Robin Goodfellow,

When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, 'His shadowy flail had thresh'd the corn, That ten day-labourers could not end,'

is marvellous enough; but it seems to have been reserved for human ingenuity to rival even the goblin himself. The threshing machine alone is computed to have increased the value of our consumable corn, to the amount of four millions of money. See Preston on the Corn Laws, p. 31.

In the midst of all this success, and of the activity and energy inspired by it, it was a mortifying discovery to the agriculturist, that while even nature herself became subservient to his mandate, there existed, in a political institution, an obstacle of the most insurmountable nature to advancing cultivation. But the extent of this obstacle was not all at once revealed. The wisdom of a previous age, legislating as it were by anticipation, had provided that on the reclaiming of barren lands, those which had never paid any tithe at all, should continue tithe-free for seven years, and those that had only paid some inferior kind of tithe, as of wool, &c. should remain for seven years chargeable only with such tithes as they had previously paid. As the inclosure and improvement of waste lands were among the most important and arduous measures of modern agriculture, and as the immense expense incurred in reclaiming them, would, in most cases, have rendered an uncompromised right of tithe ruinous to the cultivator, the relief held out by this enactment was embraced with no small complacency by the farmer and the land-owner. Doubts however arose, (and on what will not doubts arise?) as to the precise extent of the intended application of the law. The parties implicated, resorted for a solution of those doubts to the courts; and when the operation of the statute came to be discussed before the judges, it was found to be crumbling to pieces in their hands. Upon distinctions, we believe logically correct in themselves, between lands barren suapte naturæ, and lands' barren quoad agriculturam, with other technical reasonings of a similar nature, the great mass of proprietors had the satisfaction of seeing the statute of Edward VI. converted into a dead letter for all their purposes of improvement. Even this grievance, however, in part included its own remedy. It was obvious that in all cases where improvements of this kind were in contemplation, if the full demand of the tithe would have neutralized the expected profit, or have converted that profit into loss, the measure itself would not proceed. Wherever, therefore, any great increase of produce was to be expected, it was the obvious interest of the tithe owner to come to some arrangement with the proprietors, which should leave a sufficient surplus of profit in their hands, to form an inducement to carrying the measure into execution. When the tithes were in the hands of a clerical owner, particularly of a resident one, it would rarely happen that he would incur the odium of standing out against the whole mass of proprietors, in a measure affecting their common interests; and when they were in those of an impropriator, he would commonly have an equivalent, if not a superior interest, in the improvement of the land,

But still cases would occur, and did occur, where the stub bornness or tenacity of an individual would paralyze, if not

defeat, the most beneficial operations. Even supposing the full demand of tithes to be persisted in, there might, in some cases, be a balance in favour of the cultivators, upon the computation of profit, which an avaricious tithe owner might rely upon as sufficient to prevent the abandonment of the design, although by no means a compensation for the expenditure of capital, of labour, and of skill, necessary to bring the land into a state of fertility. In other cases the incumbent might be non-resident, and therefore indifferent to the good-will of his parishioners; or he might be at previous enmity with them, and so no chance of adjustment on either side. In some instances too there might be a misapprehension of the intended object of the arrangement, and in others the incumbent might resist from a principle of zeal for the interests of the church, or of duty to his successors;' a commodious form of expression adopted by many who would never lose a night's rest, if the whole series of their successors were strung head and stern, as a mariner would term it, at the bottom of the sea.

Hitherto we have been considering the operation of tithes on improvements extending over large tracts of land comprehending a variety of interests, and which have been carried on under the general name of inclosures, and sanctioned by specific Acts of Parliament. With respect to individual improvements, the obstacle was far more appalling; for besides being open to all the inconveniences of parochial inclosures, they were subject to this intolerable grievance, that as no incumbent was competent, without the aid of parliament, to bind his successor, however moderate or rationally inclined the existing tithe-owner might be in coming to an arrangement which should enable the proprietor to pursue his proposed undertaking, the improvement should no sooner be effected, and grateful Nature about to repay the bounty which had been bestowed on her, than the death or resignation of the incumbent might immediately turn the tables upon the cultivator, and an unqualified demand of the full tithe terminate his prospect of well-earned profit, if not effect his ruin. In various other ways the system was inimical to the advancement of agricultural science. There were some articles of cultivation which were so bulky, or the raising of which involved so great an expense in the first instance, that however sanguine the prospects of success, the liability to tithe amounted to a peremptory prohibition. In two particular instances, where the subjects of cultivation were of great national importance, and the supply of the foreign article took a vast sum of money annually out of the kingdom, the legislature had interfered, having in the reign of William and Mary, restricted the tithe of hemp and flax to five shillings per acre for a limited period, which restriction was made perpetual in the reign of George I., and hay