Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/31

 Frere, a very poetical diplomatist said, 'For my part, I like a country where God Almighty keeps a good deal of land in His own hands.' But, except in Valencia, where the Moors created fertility by irrigation, and Christians have carried much further the Moorish system, there is little to be learnt from Spain.

If we look to Italy, we may find there the skilful cultivation of the territory of Lucca described in Lalande's 'Travels'; the system of Tuscany, where the landlord pays half the expense of preparing the crop, and is paid by half the produce, a system condemned by Baron Ricasoli; the large dairy farms of Lombardy, and the wretched agriculture of the Pope's narrow territory; with various other systems flowing from various forms of law and government.

If we look to France, we find 7,000,000 of proprietors and 120,000,000 of properties. Undoubtedly, if the state of French agriculture be compared with the miserable condition of agricultural industry before the Revolution, great progress has been made; but if the agriculture of France be compared with that of England or Scotland, France has much to learn and much to lament.

In Belgium there is a system of very high rents and very short leases—a system which, springing from the days of the republics of Flanders and Brabant, has produced, as its results, prodigious industry and enormous produce. But the incessant labour of the Belgian occupier is the growth of centuries, and could not be introduced into Ireland by an Act of the 30th of Victoria.

Let us now turn to England, Scotland, and