rue, like Epic Poems
and even higher things, in such a trading world, has to be
presented in the market for what it will bring, and as we say be
'sold:' but the notion of 'selling,' for certain bits of metal,
the _Iliad_ of Homer, how much more the _Land_ of the World-
Creator, is a ridiculous impossibility! We buy what is saleable
of it; nothing more was ever buyable. Who can, or could, sell
it to us? Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two: To
the Almighty God; and to all His Children of Men that have ever
worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it. No
generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and
effort, sell Land on any other principle: it is not the property
of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations
that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall
work on it. Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of
any country, is properly worth nothing, except the labour
bestowed on it: This, speaking even in the language of
Eastcheap, is not correct. The rudest space of country equal in
extent to England, could a whole English Nation, with all their
habitudes, arrangements, skills, with whatsoever they do carry
within the skins of them, and cannot be stript of, suddenly take
wing, and alight on it,--would be worth a very considerable
thing! Swiftly, within year and day, this English Nation, with
its multiplex talents of ploughing, spinning, hammering, mining,
road-making and trafficking, would bring a handsome value out of
such a space of country. On the other hand, fancy what an
English Nation, once 'on the wing,' could have done with itself,
had there been simply no soil, not even an inarable one, to
alight on? Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and
whatever else; there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its
talents: this Nation will have to keep hovering on the wing,
dolefully shrieking to and fro; and perish piecemeal; burying
itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented
seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of
God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very
considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker! The last stroke of
labour bestowed on it is not the making of its value, but only
the increasing thereof.

It is very strange, the degree to which these truisms are
forgotten in our days; how, in the ever-whirling chaos of
Formulas, we have quietly lost sig