But under procrastinating, improvident, ordinary husbandmen,
who may neglect or let slip the few opportunities of sweetening and
purifying their ground with perpetually renovated toil and undissipated
attention, nothing, when tried to any extent, can be worse or more
dangerous: the farm may be ruined, instead of having the soil enriched
and sweetened by it.
But the excellence of the method on a proper soil, and conducted by
husbandmen, of whom there are few, being readily granted, how, and on
what conditions, is this culture obtained? Why, by a very great increase
of labor: by an augmentation of the third part, at least, of the
hand-labor, to say nothing of the horses and machinery employed in
ordinary tillage. Now every man must be sensible how little becoming the
gravity of legislature it is to encourage a board which recommends to
us, and upon very weighty reasons unquestionably, an enlargement of the
capital we employ in the operations of the hand, and then to pass an act
which taxes that manual labor, already at a very high rate,--thus
compelling us to diminish the quantity of labor which in the vulgar
course we actually employ.
What is true of the farmer is equally true of the middle-man,--whether
the middle-man acts as factor, jobber, salesman, or speculator, in the
markets of grain. These traders are to be left to their free course;
and the more they make, and the richer they are, and the more largely
they deal, the better both for the farmer and consumer, between whom
they form a natural and most useful link of connection,--though by the
machinations of the old evil counsellor, _Envy_, they are hated and
maligned by both parties.
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