Let us, however, now look at your vindication of High Farming. "Any one," you say, "who has read my pamphlet without prejudice will have seen that mutual co-operation between landlord and tenant, with sufficient capital and skill, encouraged in their application by moderate rents and liberal covenants, are the points urged by me as indispensably requisite to insure success under reduced prices. I illustrated these positions by the admirable practice of my friend Mr M'Culloch," (p. 6.) Now the truth is, that, in your first pamphlet, you said very little about the liberal covenant. The "liberal covenant" was a subsidiary part of your titlepage; and to this branch of your subject you only devoted a very few unsatisfactory sentences in your pamphlet. You illustrated the successful application of sufficient capital and skill by the practice of Mr M'Culloch—but not certainly the liberal covenant and the moderate rent, which were the boons of the proprietor. For the benefit of the tenant-farmers, you have more fully illustrated the subject of the liberal covenant in your High Farming Vindicated. On this subject you now deliver yourself with great enthusiasm. The following "impediments" to the more general adoption of liberal covenants you require to be removed,—(1) The law of entail must be abrogated or altered. (2) The tenant must have a legal right, at the close of his lease, to repayment for unexhausted manures. (3) The tenant must be released from paying a full rent, in a season where his potatoes are tainted, or his stock decimated. (4) The law of hypothec, which promotes a fictitious competition for land, must be repealed, (p. 22.) And you proceed to write as follows—"Some of these have been pointed at by a body of intelligent farmers who met sometime ago at Glasgow, and who further suggest that every tenant should be entitled to have his rent commuted into grain, (5) at the average prices which prevailed when he entered on his farm; giving the landlord a right (if the tenant claims commutation) to take up the farm if he pleases, on paying the tenant for his actual improvements." Here, then, five acts of Parliament, or one very comprehensive measure, seems indispensable to facilitate the adoption of liberal covenants, and to render justice to the farmer under the reduced prices. A code of new legislation is called for, whereby the present rights of landowners are to be subverted and altered, and whereby important advantages are to be communicated to tenants—and who, besides, must have unlimited powers to crop or miscrop their farms as they see fit—and all for the purpose of insuring the adoption of the Auchness liberal covenant! Of course, the new agricultural code must have a retrospective effect, not only by nullifying all existing leases, but by granting compensation for unexhausted improvements—not at their present deteriorated value, but at the value which they would have been worth had the measures of the Legislature not diminished the profits of agricultural investment. A more revolutionary change, a more sweeping reform of the law of landlord and tenant, I do not think was ever mooted.

The measures proposed I do not at present mean to consider; I notice just now the immensity of the change—"These, I would say to my brother farmers, these are practical questions, which have a direct bearing on the condition of tenants, and are worthy of our attentive consideration. Happily, they have not yet been appropriated by any political party." These questions certainly have a direct bearing on the condition of tenants; but it humbly appears to me that they have a more direct bearing on landlords, and are well worthy of their very attentive consideration. These questions have not been appropriated by any political party, and I fear will not soon be. It is an appropriation which I believe the Free-Trade legislators of Parliament, who own landed property, will most religiously shun. It would seem that there is nothing for it, but that you should enter Parliament yourself, and plead the cause of the liberal covenant. Parliamentary enactments, even to the extent indicated, will not secure all the conditions of the liberal covenant. The enlarged and improved farm-buildings are not provided for in any of the above measures, and yet without these, for the object in view, the liberal covenant is wholly abortive and incomplete. But you tell Messrs Watson and Dudgeon "that there is nothing to prevent them, with the assistance of their landlords, to have equal accommodation for their stock and their manure," (p. 13.) You make no doubt of the assistance of the landlords. On this subject you speak with a prompt and easy assurance. But that assistance may not be given. I have not heard of one proprietor tendering the Auchness covenant. Not without reason, the proprietor may refuse. In this case, you will allow that another act of Parliament becomes requisite, to render it compulsory upon landlords to rebuild or remodel and enlarge farm-buildings, so as that the necessary accommodation of the liberal covenant may be secured. We begin now to see some of the conditions of the liberal covenant, and to understand the extent of legislation requisite to pave the way for its adoption. You tell us, in large letters, that the liberal covenant is to the farmer an element "indispensably requisite, to insure success under reduced prices." High farming by itself won't do; and you justly contend that the several conditions prescribed by you must be fulfilled, before it can be proved that your remedy has failed, (p. 7.) Be it so. But you know that your liberal covenant at present is a nonentity—that it exists nowhere but at Auchness, and perhaps one or two other favoured localities. Nay, you seem to allow that absolutely it cannot, and will not, be got without the intervention of Parliament. In that I believe you to be right. And, of course, until it is got, upon your own principles the farmers of the kingdom are not to be blamed for not practising the high farming of Auchness. In their present position, you dare not even recommend that to them, your several conditions not being granted—a circumstance which would prove utterly destructive to the profits of the Auchness mode.

But will Parliament legislate to the extent and in the way necessary? Some half-dozen of statutes, would be required; a mass of legislation on interests supremely delicate, vastly momentous, and infinitely extensive in their bearings on, the structure and welfare of society. The boldest legislator might well boggle at the extent of your demand for Parliamentary interference. Protection may be an ignis fatuus, but your demands on Parliament are inconceivably more fantastic, visionary, and chimerical. You do not seem to be aware that your copious exposition of the liberal covenant, as now given, nullifies any useful or practical lesson that could have been drawn from your first pamphlet on high farming as the substitute for protection. Your two essays are antagonistic, and destructive of each other. You have chalked out as much work for Parliament as would fully occupy the House of Commons for three or four years, at the rate at which business is now carried on in our national assembly. In the mean time, and until the liberal covenant is got, what is to be done? 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. Was there ever such trifling with one of the gravest questions that ever engaged the attention of men? and was there ever such mockery of your brother farmers, in the suffering and perilous position in which Parliamentary treachery has placed them?

Admitting to its fullest extent the efficacy of high farming, it was evident, from your first pamphlet, that the Auchness husbandry could not be reduced to practice, from, amongst other causes, the lack of the immense additional capital required both by landlords and tenants; and it only remained for you to give some clear notions of the liberal covenant, and to show how unobtainable it was, which you have now done in your second pamphlet, to consummate the impracticable, visionary, and utopian character of your whole theory. The Free-trade proprietor was delighted with your first pamphlet, and hawked it about amongst his tenants. He hung with rapture over its high farming. It was acceptable to him as provision to a besieged and starving city. But he has been rudely shocked by your late lecture on the liberal covenant. He is appalled at the extent and multiplicity of your demands, and he has dismissed you from his counsels as a most dangerous and revolutionary practitioner. The farmer approves of some of the provisions of your liberal covenant, as fair and equitable; but he sees very well that, before your prescriptions can be compounded, and procured, and administered, the poor patient will expire.

Before inquiring whether the liberal covenant, in conjunction with the Auchness husbandry, will meet the emergency, we must look a little at your further illustrations of high farming. You seem, now, not so very confident of the propriety and prudence of devoting such a disproportionate extent to the culture of potatoes. It is notorious that the potato has been for many years the most uncertain and precarious of all crops; that again and again, in all kinds of soil, and under all kinds of treatment, it has utterly perished in the earth, and entailed a grievous loss upon the farmer. Accordingly, the cultivation of it was very properly all but abandoned; and it only now is being resumed upon a limited scale, and with the caution that reiterated and dear-bought experience inculcates upon all but inveterate and incurable speculators. While, then, in reference to the potato, such was the feeling and practice of the whole body of British agriculturists, flowing from an experience irresistibly cogent, and founded on the dictates of the commonest prudence, we find Mr M'Culloch, on a farm of 260 acres, devoting 60 acres in 1848, and 92 acres in 1849, to the cultivation of potatoes. 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. Well, then, what is to be said? Why, merely that Mr M'Culloch is a lucky fellow. That is all. He had potatoes untainted when there were few in the land, and he got the high price for them which scarcity caused. Here is the source of his profits. Had he lost his potato crop this season, as in past seasons thousands have done, instead of being a theoretical gainer by the farm of Auchness to the extent of £718, 6s., he would have been a practical loser to the extent of £481, 14s. In 1848, had the potatoes failed, there would have been a loss of £419. What then, in this department, are the merits of the Auchness system? Did Mr M'Culloch grow more potatoes per acre than Messrs Watson and Dudgeon did, when nature permitted them to grow them? Quite the reverse. Mr M'Culloch had no merit, unless a perilous love of speculation be meritorious, or the fortunate accident of holding a large extent of moss, of unparalleled potato-growing virtue. Is it a proof of want of skill and enterprise in Messrs Watson and Dudgeon, and Scottish farmers, that they do not happen to possess such precious moss? or is Scottish agriculture to assume generally the character of an immense gambling speculation? Unless this doctrine is meant to be inculcated, it is worse than idle to hold up the high farming of Auchness as a model, and it is ridiculous in the last degree to speak of it as a substitute for Protection. Relinquish the potatoes, as other farmers have been obliged to do, and the Auchness profits are obliterated.

Blackwood, in his January number, (p. 106,) says that he had "been informed, on the best authority, that disease has attacked the potatoes at Auchness this very year." You stoutly deny the statement, and reply, you have been imposed upon. Mr M'Culloch has at this moment 400 tons of perfectly sound potatoes, the produce of his own farm, for which he would not accept £1200; and seed besides, to plant his next year's crop. Well, he has on 92 acres 400 tons, and enough for seed according to your own allowance. He ought, with an average good crop, to have had 800 tons. Competent judges, who saw these potatoes when growing, estimated them at 12 tons per acre; and, in this view, it would appear that nearly two-thirds of them have disappeared. As far, then, as the potato crop at Auchness is concerned, there has, in 1849, been either miserable farming, or there has been something else. Your own figures prove this. You speak of 400 tons sound potatoes. Were there any unsound? Why not have stated that Mr M'Culloch had lost about half of his potatoes this season, by the taint? This would have homologated Blackwood's statement that disease had attacked the Auchness potatoes. But surely the cause of high farming, and the interests of agriculture, cannot be promoted by a suppression of the truth, and by such a lack of controversial candour. However, the scanty crop of potatoes, or the loss by disease, curtails materially the huge profits at Auchness. In 1848, when potatoes were much higher priced than now, Mr M'Culloch was content to take £2 per ton; and although he marks them down in his Balance-sheet for 1849 at £3 per ton, you tell us that he would not accept that for them. Not, indeed, that he has got the £3 per ton, or been offered it. But he thinks that they are worth that money; and according, not to the purchaser's estimate, but to the seller's, they stand for £1200 on the receipt side of the Balance-sheet. This is, upon the whole, the simplest, most convenient, and felicitous mode of keeping up the profits that we remember of; and proves, incontestibly, how sensible Mr M'Culloch is that everything at Auchness turns upon the potato speculation. And yet, with 400 tons only on 92 acres, let us inquire if this was really a profitable crop. Let us see what was the expense of growing them. In your first pamphlet you state that 50 carts of dung and 4 cwt. guano are allowed per acre, (p. 18.) Let us say that the dung is worth 5s. per load, and the guano 9s. 6d. per cwt; there will then be—

For dung to the 92 acres,£1150 00
For guano, to the 92 acres,174160
For seed at 7 cwt., (p. 33,) at £2 per ton,64 80
Rent,9200
Cost of production,£148140
Produce raised,120000
Loss,£28140

I do not calculate the value of the horse and manual labour, which in the cultivation of potatoes is by no means trifling. Let that go to meet the seed potatoes reserved, and the unexhausted manure in the soil: and yet the factor at Auchness seems a loser in 1849, by his potato crop. And yet it is undeniable, nevertheless, in consequence of the extremely depreciated price of grain, that the sale even of this potato crop does add a larger present return in money to the profit side of the Balance-sheet than a crop of wheat would have done. But as the potato, when sold off the farm, leaves no pabulum for future manure, the prosperity is more apparent than real. Unless a much larger quantity than 400 tons, even at £3 per ton, can be raised on 92 acres, the crop must ultimately entail loss, which the Balance-sheet will not be able to conceal.

You sneer at Mr Gibson of Woolmet's potato cultivation. Why he, as you yourself stated the case, after allowing for manures, seed, and rent, left himself a profit of £15 on 50 acres of potatoes; while at Auchness, on 92 acres, as above shown, the profit, after allowing for manures, seed, and rent, is £281, 4s. less than nothing! Moreover, you keep out of sight that, on the four-course rotation of farming, which Mr Gibson must follow in the neighbourhood of a large town, it is not alone to the profit from the very expensively manured green crop of the first year that the farmer looks alone for a return of his outlay, but chiefly to that from the produce of the three succeeding years, which can be raised after the preparation the land has undergone for the green crop, without farther manuring. You are very violent about Mr Gibson's growing beans. Had you examined Mr Gibson's statements carefully, you would have perceived that the difference in the result, consequent on his substituting 25 acres of beans and turnips for the same quantity of land in potatoes, is only £31, 17s. 6d., instead of the much larger sum which you mention. Did you ever see Mr Gibson's farm of Woolmet? I have, and beg to inform you that I know no better specimen of well manured and highly cultivated land in the county of Mid-Lothian. There is no farmer in Scotland who has received so many prizes for the finest specimens of seed-corn of all kinds, from the Highland and other agricultural societies, as Mr Gibson. This is the gentleman whose farming you ignorantly sneer at.

But you are ready to abandon the peculiar position that you had taken up in reference to the exorbitant cultivation of the potato, and to meet your opponents upon their own ground, as you believe. "Suppose, however," you say, "that nature had, (as you asserted,) annihilated the potato, would Mr M'Culloch not be able to draw any other kind of produce from his 90 acres of highly manured land?" (p. 7.) Why, certainly not, in the same year. Had nature annihilated the potato at Auchness in 1849, Mr M'Culloch would have lost, by his own calculation, £1200, and could have had no other crop—unless, indeed, there be two summers at Auchness within the year. "Had these 90 acres been sown with wheat, they would, at Mr Stephens' own estimate, have produced no less than £810." Mr Stephens did not meditate growing wheat on the moss. Do you mean to say that you can grow wheat on the moss, and profitably, year after year in succession, as was done with the potatoes? But suppose the 90 acres in wheat—that, added to the 55 acres already in wheat, would make 145 acres in wheat on a farm of 260 acres; and this must continue, if there is anything in your theory, and if your annual profits are to be maintained. If these positions you do not mean to maintain, your case falls to pieces. In the mean time it is a mere hypothesis, untried and unproved; and all agricultural experience and science, as far as known, compels us to believe that it would turn out a total failure. But, admitting the hypothesis, still the tenant's profits (seed deducted) would be reduced from £718, 6s., to £328, 6s. You propose another suggestion, however—to allocate the 90 acres partly to an extension of green crop, and partly to an increased breadth of wheat. Will turnips and clover grow, year after year successively, on the moss? This is another hypothesis about as visionary as the preceding. But allow 45 acres of the 90 on turnips and grass for house-feeding, at your nett profit of £6, 11s. 6d. per acre, (p. 12,) this will give £295, 17s. 6d.; and the other 45 acres in wheat, at 38 bushels per acre, and at 5s. per bushel, (your own quantity and price,) and, seed deducted, they give £393, 15s., being, in cumulo, £689, 12s. 6d.—i. e. less than the profit of the potatoes by £510, 7s. 6d., and bringing down the tenant's remuneration from £718, 6s. to £207, 18s. 6d. But this is very far from exhibiting the realities of the position which you have ventured to take up. You assume 5s. per bushel as the price of the wheat. The Wigtonshire fiars, as lately struck, make wheat only 4s. 4d. per bushel. To that price you cannot object. You court a comparison with Messrs Watson and Dudgeon, and in that case you will allow us to raise the rent of Auchness to 32s. per acre, (the rent given in their statistics,) more especially as you contend that it is now worth £2 per acre, (p. 41, 4th edit.) Upon these equitable premises, let us see how the Auchness balance-sheet for crop 1849 will stand.