personal labor or superintendence; sometimes an equally cheerful
reticence in respect to any interest upon capital; and in nearly all of
them such miniature expression of the cost of labor as gives a very
shaky consistency to the exhibit.

Farmers, I am aware, are not much given to figures; but outside
"averagers" are; and agricultural writers, if they indulge in figures,
ought to show some decent respect for the proprieties of arithmetic. I
have before me now the "Bi-Monthly Report of the United States
Agricultural Department for January and February, 1864," in the course
of which it is gravely asserted, that, in the event of a certain
suggested tax on tobacco, "the tobacco-grower would find at the end of
the year two hundred and ten percent of his crops unsold." Now I am not
familiar with the tobacco-crop, and still less familiar with the
Washington schemes of taxation; but whatever may be the exigencies of
the former, and whatever may be the enormities of the latter, I find
myself utterly unable to measure, even proximately, the misfortune of a
tobacco-grower who should find himself stranded with two hundred and ten
percent of his crop, after his sales were closed! It is plainly a case
involving a pretty large _quid pro quo_, if it be not a clear one of
_nisi quid_.

* * * * *

Sir John Sinclair, so honorably known in connection with British
agriculture, dealt with an estate in Scotland of a hundred thousand
acres. He parcelled this out in manageable farms, advanced money to
needy tenants, and by his liberality and enterprise gave enormous
increase to his rental. He also organized the first valid system for
obtaining agricultural statistics through the clergymen of the different
parishes in Scotland, thus bringing together a vast amount of valuable
information, which was given to the public at intervals between 1790 and
1798. And I notice with interest that the poet Burns was a contributor
to one of these volumes,[D] over the signature of "A Peasant," in which
he gives account of a farmers' library established in his neighborhood,
and adds, in closing,--"A peasant who can read and enjoy such books is
certainly a much superior being to his neighbor, who, perhaps, stalks
beside his team, very little removed, except in shape, from the brutes
he drives."

There is reason to believe that Sir John Sinclair, at one time,--in the
heat of the French Revolution,--projected emigration to Ame