and propensities in the mind of man, capable of overcoming those to which he is originally subjected; which engenders those habits and views which lay the foundation of the progress of society, and converts the indolent inhabitant of the forest or the desert into the laborious assistant of cultivated Nature. Rousseau has said, that he who first enclosed a field and called it his own, has to answer for all the misery which has ensued in society. He would have been nearer the truth had he said, that he had laid the foundation of the greatest improvement and happiness which man is capable of receiving.

As the appropriation of land was destined to produce such important changes in the state of society, and in the habits and manners of mankind in general, a provision was made for it in some of the most powerful feelings of which our nature is susceptible. The desire of acquiring property in the soil, the attachment to a home, and the love of the place of their nativity, are among the strongest feelings of the human breast, and which, in the progress of society, are the first to be developed. In every part of the world where agricultural labour has been commenced, these dispositions are found to exist. Mr Young tells us, that in France the attachment to landed property is so strong among the lower orders, that the inheritance of their fathers is religiously preserved, and made the object of unceasing affection, though it sometimes consists only of a single tree. * "The universal object of ambition in the French peasantry," says the Baron de Stael," is to become proprietor of a little piece of ground, or to add to that which they have

Travels in France, i. 496.

received from their parents. This desire is of very ancient date, and the only effect of the Revolution was to confirm this tendency, by furnishing them with more extensive means of gratifying it. They generally purchase inconsiderately in this respect, that they give more than the land is worth: counting their labour for nothing, as it forms the universal condition of their existence." * Land in Ceylon is so much subdivided, and tenaciously held, that an inheritance sometimes consists only of the 34th of a single tree.† The same principle is mentioned by Mr Park, as influencing, in the strongest manner, the African negroes. "This desire is felt," says he, "in its full force by the poor African. To him no water. is sweet but that which is drawn from his own well; and no shade refreshing but the tabbe tree of his native dwelling. When he is carried into captivity by a neighbouring tribe, he never ceases to languish during his exile, seizes the first moment to escape, rebuilds with haste his fallen walls, and exults to see the smoke ascend from his native village."‡ Nor are the Hindoos less strongly influenced by the same attachment. Considering, as they invariably do, their little possessions as their own property, which it clearly is, according to the general custom of the east, they cannot by any amount of misfortune be torn away from the village of their nativity. "Their villages are, indeed, frequently burned or destroyed by hostile forces, the little community dispersed, and its land returned to a state of Nature; but when better times return, and the means of peaceable occupation are again restored, the remnant reassemble with their

Baron de Stael, 87. † Heber, iii. 197. Travels in Africa, i. 247.

children in the paternal inheritance. A generation may pass away, but the succeeding generation returns; the sons take the place of their fathers; the same trades and occupations are filled by the descendants of the same individuals; the same division of land takes place; the very houses are rebuilt on the site of those which had been destroyed; and, emerging from the storm, the community revives another and the same. "*

The influence of the habits which the appropriation of land produces, appears nowhere so strongly as in its effect upon the character of the female sex. In all savage countries, the situation of women is debased in the extreme; and the effect of the hardships and sufferings which they undergo, is such as almost to obliterate the finest traits of the female character. The acquisition of a home, of a fixed residence, and of a permanent object, not only relieves them from many of the most severe employments to which they were formerly subjected, but gives room to the developement of those gentle qualities and domestic dispositions, for which they are peculiarly fitted by the wisdom of Nature. And while it thus produces a change of the most important kind in the character of women, it accustoms men to those habits of order and assiduity, and that love of domestic happiness, which are best calculated to increase their respect and affection for the other sex. Women in this way come to hold the situation destined for them in the economy of Nature the gentleness of their disposition is in some degree imparted to the young of the rising generation; and more peaceable habits are diffused

.

Commons' Committee, 1832, p. 29; Lords', 1832, 398, 391, & 405.

through all ranks of society. The Hottentots, accordingly, are represented by Mr Park, and all the travellers in Africa,* as gentle and humane in the highest degree; and the humanity of a negro woman is the subject of a well known and popular song; while the Moors, who lead a wandering and unsettled life, are brutal, rapacious, and cruel; and even the characteristic gentleness of women seems among them to be in a great measure effaced.

In every part of the world, accordingly, the first step to improvement, and the first impulse to human exertion, has arisen from the appropriation of landed property. "No period, in the civilisation of a people, is so important," says Mr Tooke, " as the transition from the pastoral life to agriculture: it is this which forms the boundary between civilized and barbarous nature and of the importance of this the Russian empire affords continual experience. Industry there uniformly begins in the pastoral countries with the division of land, and the commencement of agriculture." The Society of Quakers in America, observ ing the failure of all other methods to civilize the North American Indians, persuaded them to fix themselves in villages, and attempt agricultural labour : and, in spite of all the obstacles which their indolence opposed to this change, the acquisition of a home and of landed property produced, in a very short space of time, a great alteration in the habits and desires of these uncultivated people. No ruler of mankind

* Park, i. 274, 299, 241-2; Denham and Clapperton, ii. 372-4. †Tooke's View of the Russian Empire, Vol. iii. p. 231.

Account of the Society of Quakers in America for converting the Native Indians.

was ever more strongly impressed with these truths than one whose celebrity as a warrior has unfortu nately cast into the shade his great views and matchless sagacity as a statesman,-Alexander the Great, -whose efforts were incessant, after he had won the Persian crown, to reclaim the nomade tribes, on the northern frontier of his immense dominions, from the desultory habits of the pastoral, to the fixed occupations of agricultural life.*

As the division of land is thus the great step in the progress of improvement, so its distribution among the lower orders, in civilized society, is essential to maintain that elevation of mind which the separa tion of employments has a tendency to depress. It is too frequently the melancholy effect of the division of labour, which takes place in the progress of opu. lence, to degrade the individual character among the poor; to reduce men to mere machines; and prevent the developement of those powers and faculties which, in earlier times, are called forth by the difficulties and dangers with which men are then compelled to struggle. It is hence that the wise and the good have so often been led to deplore the degrading effect of national civilisation that the vast fabric of society has been regarded as concealing only the weakness and debasement of the great body by whom it has been erected: and that the eye of the philanthropist turns from the view of national grandeur and private degradation, to scenes where a nobler spirit is nursed, amid the freedom of the desert or the solitude of the forest. To correct this great evil, Nature has provided various remedies, arising naturally from the situation of man

Gillies's Greece, v. 49, and Arrian, Indic. c. xl.