On
any other terms he is the slave of the consumer: and that he should be
so is of no benefit to the consumer. No slave was ever so beneficial to
the master as a freeman that deals with him on an equal footing by
convention, formed on the rules and principles of contending interests
and compromised advantages. The consumer, if he were suffered, would in
the end always be the dupe of his own tyranny and injustice. The landed
gentleman is never to forget that the farmer is his representative.
It is a perilous thing to try experiments on the farmer. The farmer's
capital (except in a few persons and in a very few places) is far more
feeble than commonly is imagined. The trade is a very poor trade; it is
subject to great risks and losses. The capital, such as it is, is turned
but once in the year; in some branches it requires three years before
the money is paid: I believe never less than three in the turnip and
grass-land course, which is the prevalent course on the more or less
fertile sandy and gravelly loams,--and these compose the soil in the
south and southeast of England, the best adapted, and perhaps the only
ones that are adapted, to the turnip husbandry.
It is very rare that the most prosperous farmer, counting the value of
his quick and dead stock, the interest of the money he turns, together
with his own wages as a bailiff or overseer, ever does make twelve or
fifteen per centum by the year on his capital.
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