t was to be ruined, or he himself that
was to want an income, knowing well beforehand to which side the
balance would incline. Nor would we much like to see our tenantry at
the mercy of even an average class of proprietors, by no means in the
extreme circumstances of their poorer brethren, but who, with an
unimpeachable bond in their hands, that enabled them to say whether it
was they themselves or their tenant neighbours who were to be the
poorer in consequence of the induced change, would be but too apt, in
accordance with the selfish bent of man's common nature, to make a
somewhat Shylock-like use of it. Stout men who have fallen into
reduced circumstances, and stout paw-sucking bears in their winter
lodgings, become gradually thin by living on their own fat; and quite
right it is that gross men and corpulent bears _should_ live on their
own fat, just because the fat is their own. But we would not deem it
right that our proprietors should live on their farmers' fats: on the
contrary, we would hold it quite wrong, and a calamity to the country;
and such, at the present time, is the great danger to which the
tenantry of Scotland are exposed. Justice imperatively demands, that
if some such change is now to take place in the value of farms, as
that which took place on the regulation of the currency in the value
of money, the ruinous blunder of 1819 should not be repeated. It
demands that their actual rent be not greatly increased through the
retention of the merely nominal one; that the tenant, in short, be not
sacrificed to a term wholly unchanged in sound, but altogether altered
in value. And such, in reality, is the object for which the
farm-holding agriculturists of Scotland have now to contend. It is the
only quarrel which they can prosecute with a hope of success.

We referred, in a recent number, when remarking on the too palpable
unpopularity of the Whigs, to questions which, if animated by a
really honest regard for the liberties of the subject, they might
agitate, and grow strong in agitating, secure of finding a potent ally
in the moral sense of the country. One of these would involve the
emancipation of the tenantry of England, now sunk, through one of the
provisions of the Reform Bill, into a state of vassalage and
political subserviency without precedent since at least the days of
Henry VIII. It has been well remarked by Paley, that the direct
consequences of political innovations are often the least import