The Law Quarterly Review Volume 21 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 150 A SCHEME OF COPYHOLD ENFRANCHISEMENT. LAND and conservatism are inseparably connected. Agriculture in its most modern and scientific, as well as in its more primitive and haphazard methods, is above all things a matter of routine. The rigid observance of the daily and the yearly round of duties is absolutely necessary for its successful practice, and the man who departs from the established methods on an extensive scale, instead of trying small and tentative experiments, is almost certain to court failure. Again, the life of the farmer and the tiller is necessarily move solitary than the life of those who stay amid the busy hum of men; and ideas take longer to fructify and longer to get absorbed in country districts than in more populous places. The great advantage of this spirit is stability; for while it is maintained there is small chance of any new and ill-considered ideas being put into practice on the spur of the moment, and bringing about unforeseen disaster. However, be the reason what it may, of the fact there can be little doubt. The landlord, the farmer, and the labourer among all nations are prone to do what their fathers have done before them; they are conservative in ideas, conservative in practice, conservative in thought, word, and deed. Of this fact the Land Laws, in all feudal countries at any rate, arc a good example. Any attempt to change them in any particular meets with an enormous amount of passive resistance1, and of all laws they are the last to change. Feudal tenures were not finally abolished until 1660, though they were a grievous burden and quite opposed to the spirit of both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the cumbersome, dilatory, and expensive system of conveying entailed estates by Fines and Recoveries continued until 183...