The Sun.
London, England, 1856-10-20 00:00:00

preachers (other preachers are not often so honest)
confessed they did not understand the subject so
well as those who listened to them ; but Mr.
MELVILLE (he of the golden lecture, if we remem-
ber aright) tells us that error taught by a
" successor of the Apostles" will do us good, "the
ordination converting the poison into food." So our
farmers seem to think ; for they listened with
patience to heresy, and with cheers to appeals
to prejudiqe ; but did not, as mere agricultural
laymen, venture to trespass on the divine right
of landlords to teach farmers.

But bow is this ? Are there really not as
many educated farmers capable of making a tell-
ing speech on their own business as there are
landlords in the same extent of country ? AU
other classes of Englishmen, down to the manu-

facturing operative, furnish good speakers, on
what they do understand, and declaimers even
rather too effective on what they do not under-
stand. Do the green fields dispose to thought
and reflection, and indispose to utterance of
thought ? Certainly QUINCTILIAN does prefer the
cell to the beauties of nature for the orator's
plac3 of study. Still, few will blame the fields for
tie taciturnity of their cultivators. Is it want of
matter ? Certainly not ; the topics on which the
landlords of all orders descant on these occa-
sions are those more familiar to the farmers than
to their Lords. Neither is it exactly the want of
education, for there are educated men among
farmers—and with Englishmen, everywhere,
vigorous good sense and shrewd telling remarks
will, even with the educated, more than atone for
delinquencies against MURRAY, and be much pre-
ferred to polished or trite inanity.
We suspect the real cause of bucolic silence to
be, the relation of landlord and tenant. The same
cause as makes farmers afraid to tell the
amount of their produce to the collector of Agri-
cultural Statistics, renders them mute before
their landlords. Subjects of every kind are reticent
before their masters. Liberty and independence
are essential to free speech. Who ever heard of
a great orator in an absolute Monarchy ? There
are, it is said, some four hundred Agricultural
Societies in England, yet how rare is it to hear
farmers speak at all, and how much more rare to
hear them point out the mischiefs of yearly
tenures, and stringent covenants, and game pre-
serving. We do not know that we ever saw the
proposal by a farmer that farms should be let, as
land is for building, for 70 or 90 years ; yet
obviously no cultivator, any more than a builder,
could lay out much money on a piece of land
without a certainty of enjoying the fruits of his
expenditure. Why should not a farmer, with a
genius for improvement, purchase on, as we may
call it, a building lease, effect his improvements,
and sell his lease, containing only a few reason-
able stipulations, just as •in towns we are doing
every day witk building land. It is such a sys-
tem alone which will secure the highest cultivation
of the soil.

Yes, but then comes the rub. The successor
to the Normans cares more about the relics of
feudal power than even about his own pocket.
Subservient voters, and dutiful preservers of the
vermin which destroy his turnips, are more prized
than a larger and safer income. On a proper
system of leasing, rents of farms, even without
special laws for landlords, might become as much
prized an investment as ground-rents. But then
the vote would be gone, and Sir ROBERT or Sir
HARRY would no longer be lord of the farmer as
well as lord of the soil. Even the ballot would
be deprived of half its value, for undoubtedly the
farmers are the great class who, above all, need
it. Not one farmer in a hundred now gives an
independent vote. The use of the ballot to him
would be that, after he had overcome the force of
long habit, he would think and vote for himself ;
and when he began to do that, his landlord would
prefer to give him a lease worthy of a freemen.