From the account which you have given in your first pamphlet, of the agricultural condition of Auchness when it first fell into the hands of Mr M'Culloch, it appears to have been in a state of the most primitive and unparalleled barbarity. Receiving unwonted encouragement from the proprietor, he commenced a process of vigorous improvement, which he is accomplishing regardless of expense. By and by he will have achieved his object, and the outlay will be greatly diminished. We are not left to conjecture on this subject, for, in a note appended to his balance-sheet, Mr M'Culloch tells us, that, "next year the large sum for purchased manures will be reduced at least one-half;" and that he "will be able, in a year or two, to dispense altogether with the expenditure for purchased manures." The plain truth seems to be, that Mr M'Culloch is in course of doing what Blackwood's farmers, Mr Dudgeon, and thousands of other farmers, have already done. What is the meaning, then, of all this ridiculous rant about the high farming at Auchness? If, at the end of twenty years, Mr M'Culloch can grow the crops which Blackwood's farmers are now growing, and gets his facts attested as they have got theirs, it will prove very creditable management.

You ask what Blackwood's farmers have done to multiply bread-stuffs for a growing population? That is a most singular question for the eulogist of the Auchness potato-husbandry to have hazarded. Towards the production of cereals there are only 55 acres set apart at Auchness—a smaller proportion than, perhaps, on any farm of similar extent and soil in the kingdom. The potato is the sheet-anchor of your wealth, and the staple food you grow for the people; and to this fickle root you devote more than a third of the whole farm. And yet is not the potato, as the main source of a people's food, which your system makes it, the very root of physical degradation, and the very type of moral wretchedness? Was not the excessive cultivation of the potato the main cause of Ireland's misery, and of the famine that desolated her shores? And was not the lesson derived by every thoughtful man, from the dread visitation, a conviction of the folly and peril of making this precarious root the mainstay of a people's food? and was not the hope cherished that the Great Ruler, whose prerogative it is to bring good out of evil, might over-rule the pestilence and the famine to advance the improvement of Irish husbandry, and the comfort of the Irish people? But, in infatuated defiance of the warnings of Providence, and the stern lessons proclaimed by famine, you hold up, as a model for British farmers, a system of agriculture in which the most prominent feature is an excessive cultivation of the potato. 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! 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. No class of the community feel the effects of Free Trade more than they do, as their early crops, on which they principally relied, are entirely forestalled by supplies from Hamburg, Rotterdam, and other foreign ports. Forgetting your advocacy of "bread-stuffs," you are high in your praises of "edible roots;" and vegetable productions must now, it appears, be the source of agricultural prosperity. Where could a market be found for table roots, if generally cultivated by the farmers of the kingdom? Man does not belong to the herbivorous tribes. Cabbages and colewort won't sustain him. Bread, to him, is the staff of life. Roots are a windy, watery diet; they breed melancholy and send vapoury fumes to the brain. We must have "cakes and ale" in spite of you.

You have favoured the world, in your present pamphlet, with some singularly original views on the subject of rent, which throw a flood of light on your theory of high farming and the liberal covenant, and which I think dissipate all the mystery and difficulty in which otherwise you had left these subjects surrounded. Blackwood's farmers, you say, "give us estimates of what they lose by Free Trade; and it is a remarkable circumstance that, in every case, the estimated loss might be converted into a profit, simply by changing the figure which they put down for rent!" (p. 28, 29.) Most notable discovery! Instead of being 32s. per acre, had Messrs Watson and Dudgeon's rent been 12s. or 2s. per acre, all would be right, says the new agricultural oracle. Who ever doubted this? And so, after much idle chaffering, and most wearisome circumlocution, the truth at last leaps to the light—the loss which the farmer incurs by Free Trade is to be converted into a profit simply by changing the figure of the rent. The idea is admirable, and it is enunciated with exquisite coolness; and it possesses the sublime simplicity that distinguishes all the happy discoveries of genius. 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. I am not exaggerating your prescription for agricultural difficulty—nor has it dropped from your pen per incuriam—you reiterate the same view in your remarks upon Mr Munro's pamphlet, to indicate the importance you attach to it. Mr Munro, you write, "of course had to use his own discretion only as to the rotation of cropping, and might exterminate every head of game on his estate. He could have reduced the rent to please himself. Yet, possessing all these advantages, Mr Munro was unable to farm at a profit," (p. 31.) Mr Munro had fixed a rent on his land, such as he could have easily got from a competent tenant; but the intervention of Free Trade annihilated his profit. You are astonished at his simplicity. He could reduce his rent to please himself; and, by changing the figure, transmute his loss into a profit. Being both proprietor and tenant, he could play with impunity the game of "change the figures." He never could lose, for what the laird lost the tenant gained. Blackwood's farmers, in their unsophisticated simplicity, never seem to have dreamed of changing the figure. They may have been prevented by qualms of conscience. They may have questioned the morality of the proceeding, or doubted the propriety even of its political economy. 'Tis a pity you did not sooner publish this part of the Auchness specific. It would have saved much profitless discussion. It is by far the most vital element in your liberal covenant, and completes its perfect development. It happily explains and illustrates the Auchness balance-sheet. By this time the proprietors of the kingdom will understand the pleasant position in which you are to put them. With the right of hypothec abrogated, a rotation of crops exploded, and their rent lowered until it meets the depreciated prices, and converts the tenant's loss into profit, they will fall into a very enviable predicament. I sympathise with the Free-trade lairds. Sad and dismal are their meditations, and deep and bitter their murmurs. They say they are betrayed, and that they have reared up and cherished an enemy in their camp.

There is another question, however, which your philosophy does not seem to embrace. You never seem to have inquired whether the immense reduction of rents which must take place to meet the present prices, (which are yet daily falling,) so as to convert the farmer's loss into a profit, is to be a national benefit. 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. 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; and, whatever you may fancy, you cannot reduce rent to the extent you have now pointed out, without inflicting misery, not only on the tenant-farmers and agricultural labourers, but sooner or later on every class in the community. The certain tendency of your agricultural speculation, and by no long circumduction, is to sink the agriculture of Britain to the condition of Irish husbandry, and to overrun the nation with pauperism. The landed interest will not suffer with impunity; and between it and the moneyed interest an internecine war will ensue. There is a set of pestilent demagogues and pretended patriots, flourishing at this moment in the kingdom, who are busy instilling into the masses the revolutionary idea that the landlord's rent is a robbery of the community, and that it may be dealt with as conveniency requires. In your latest essay you have pandered to this pernicious delusion. I do not blame you for so doing. I believe that you write in a childlike innocence, and with total blindness to the necessary consequences of your own doctrines.

I have been exceedingly edified and amused with the manner in which you have expounded the theory of rotation. "The slavish adoption of fixed rules of rotation are suited only to a comparatively low state of agriculture. Nature has no rotation of crops—the plant bursts from the earth, grows, bears its produce, and drops the matured seed to reproduce itself beside the root of the parent stem. The skilful gardener lays none of his land to rest in grass," (p. 17.) This may be fine writing, but it is unmitigated nonsense. Nature has a rotation of crops; and from nature the agriculturist took the hint, and got his teaching. The distribution of that part of the indigenous flora of a country which constitutes its annuals, is ever liable to vary. Nature's annual weeds flourish for a while in the same spot; but, having exhausted the peculiar nutriment in the soil which sustained them, they degenerate and migrate to a fresh locality. The plants which the farmers grow are chiefly annuals. But, in fact, two crops of the same kind of wood on the same soil is not according to the arboriculture which nature teaches. "The plant bursts from the earth, grows, bears its produce, and drops the matured seed to reproduce itself." Well, and what then? Can the farmer take the lesson? Is it not with this very habit of nature that his art must wage an incessant warfare? The skilful gardener has a rotation of crops, although he grows none of the cereal tribes, which especially rejoice in the alternative system of husbandry; and if the skilful gardener does not lay down "his land to rest in grass," his costly substitute is to trench his plot every fourth or fifth year to the depth of three or four feet, and thus to invigorate the wearied soil, by amalgamating it with fresh mould. The exhausted surface, the Auchness experimenter is compelled to remove. It is not very accurate to speak of the farmer "laying his land to rest in grass." He puts it under grass as an improving crop, and one which a system of agriculture cannot dispense with—a crop, too, which in many situations yields a larger free profit than he could otherwise raise from the land.

I do not remember of ever meeting with more ignorance of botany, vegetable physiology, and horticulture, condensed into a shorter space than you have succeeded in cramming into the few sentences just quoted. But, in a brave contempt of what you had written, you tell us, on the very next page, that you "do not mean to say that the system of rotations has been without its use." 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. The farmers of the kingdom are an immensely numerous body, and you cannot expect them to be all men of genius. Let your philanthropy prompt you to stoop for a time from your transcendental height, that you may minister to the wants of average humanity.

I am not surprised that you are angry with Peter Plough. This is very excusable. You had said in your first pamphlet, (p. 28,) that it was demonstrable that, if all the arable land in the same parish were cultivated as the Auchness farm was, immense benefits would accrue to the people. Mr Plough's expansive patriotism was not to be limited by the parochial boundaries, and he determined, if possible, to give the benefits of the system to the whole of the kingdom. With this view, he instituted an inquiry, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the Auchness system was capable of general adoption. Nothing could be more fair. You had, in fact, challenged the inquiry, by representing high farming as the substitute for Protection. Peter Plough, by a cogent and crushing demonstration, proved the utter inapplicability of the Auchness system for general adoption. He has impaled you on the horns of a dilemma, and no wonder that you are writhing in anguish. You try to smile, but, alas! it is too evident that your laugh is like that of the third ruffian in the melodrama, when the skeleton is discovered in the closet, and supplies the last link in the chain of circumstantial evidence. Manifestly the salt tears are seen to trickle over your abashed countenance.

Peter Plough understated his case. Include Ireland in his calculation, and adopt the more recent statistics of Porter, giving the increase in the mercantile navy, and Mr Plough's demonstration remains intact and impregnable. He had shown that, to apply the Auchness system to British husbandry, thirty-eight millions of additional capital would be required by British farmers, for the feeding stuffs and artificial manures; and he naturally asked where this "sum of money was to be got?" "And pray, good Peter, where is it to go?" you respond. Why, certainly, the first question in order of time and of prudence is, where is the money to be got?—unless, indeed, it be part of your system to make your money go before it be got! When you tell us that every ounce of the feeding stuffs used at Auchness was raised on British soil, you forget and misstate. The lintseed, (p. 21, first pamphlet,) and the oilcake, (p. 23, second pamphlet,) are not of British production. The bruised oats and bean meal for the cattle, and the supplemental quantity of oats for the servants and horses, may be indeed of British production—although not grown on the farm of Auchness. But how long, think you, are farmers to grow these grains at a loss, to benefit the Auchness factor? He is dependent upon others for his supplies of these feeding stuffs.

Peter Plough has, in fact, compelled you to eat your leek, for you now tell us that the high farming at Auchness is, "as an example, to be taken in the spirit more than in the letter." What! have you forgotten that you set it forth "as the Substitute for Protection?" and that, if your language had any meaning, you intimated that its virtue would be equipollent and co-extensive with that of the plundered crutch? And now, forsooth, you veer about, with slippery versatility, and tell us that you are to be "read in the spirit more than in the letter." When such grave interests are at stake, this seems to me intolerable trifling, although no doubt it provides a door of escape for you, whatever disaster may attend the adoption of your expedient. In every such case the model will have been copied with a servility too literal, or a liberality too latitudinarian; and there seems nothing for it but that the bewildered husbandman, before he embarks on the career of high farming, and runs the risk of mistaking the letter for the spirit, shall make a pilgrimage to Baldoon and consult the oracle, and ask the author to interpret his impenetrable text.

Whether it pleases you or not, this question must be agitated and tested, and sifted and probed to the very bottom—namely, Is the mode of farm management pursued by Mr M'Culloch upon Auchness capable of being adopted in the general cultivation of the land of the country? This is the only question at all interesting to the agriculturists of the kingdom—the only question at all germane to their present position. If this is not meant, your high farming is a childish bauble. Its value, not only as a substitute for Protection, but as an instructive lesson in husbandry, must be determined by a correct solution of the preceding query. We find, then, upon a farm of 260 acres, that crops 1848 and 1849 give an average extent of 81 acres under grain, 48 acres in grass, and 131 acres in green crops; and of the latter, 78½ acres are potatoes all to be sold off.