The farmers too, besides paying the rent, were anciently, it was supposed, bound to perform a great number of services to the landlord, which were seldom either specified in the lease, or regulated by any precise rule, but by the use and wont of the manor or barony.These services, therefore, being almost entirely arbitrary, subjected the tenant to many vexations.In Scotland the abolition of all services not precisely stipulated in the lease has in the course of a few years very much altered for the better the condition of the yeomanry of that country.
The public services to which the yeomanry were bound were not less arbitrary than the private ones.To make and maintain the high roads, a servitude which still subsists, I believe, everywhere, though with different degrees of oppression in different countries, was not the only one.When the king's troops, when his household or his officers of any kind passed through any part of the country, the yeomanry were bound to provide them with horses, carriages, and provisions, at a price regulated by the purveyor.Great Britain is, I believe, the only monarchy in Europe where the oppression of purveyance has been entirely abolished.It still subsists in France and Germany.
The public taxes to which they were subject were as irregular and oppressive as the services.The ancient lords, though extremely unwilling to grant themselves any pecuniary aid to their sovereign, easily allowed him to tallage, as they called it their tenants, and had not knowledge enough to foresee how much this must in the end affect their own revenue.The taille, as it still subsists in France, may serve as an example of those ancient tallages.It is a tax upon the supposed profits of the farmer, which they estimate by the stock that he has upon the farm.It is his interest, therefore, to appear to have as little as possible, and consequently to employ as little as possible in its cultivation, and none in its improvement.Should any stock happen to accumulate in the hands of a French farmer, the taille is almost equal to a prohibition of its ever being employed upon the land.This tax, besides, is supposed to dishonour whoever is subject to it, and to degrade him below, not only the rank of a gentleman, but that of a burgher, and whoever rents the lands of another becomes subject to it.No gentleman, nor even any burgher who has stock, will submit to this degradation.This tax, therefore, not only hinders the stock which accumulates upon the land from being employed in its improvement, but drives away an other stock from it.The ancient tenths and fifteenths, so usual in England in former times, seem, so far as they affected the land, to have been taxes of the same nature with the taille.
Under all these discouragements, little improvement could be expected from the occupiers of land.That order of people, with all the liberty and security which law can give, must always improve under great disadvantages.The farmer, compared with the proprietor, is as a merchant who trades with borrowed money compared with one who trades with his own.The stock of both may improve, but that of the one, with only equal good conduct, must always improve more slowly than that of the other, on account of the large share of the profits which is consumed by the interest of the loan.The lands cultivated by the farmer must, in the same manner, with only equal good conduct, be improved more slowly than those cultivated by the proprietor, on account of the large share of the produce which is consumed in the rent, and which, had the farmer been proprietor, he might have employed in the further improvement of the land.The station of a farmer besides is, from the nature of things, inferior to that of a proprietor.
Through the greater part of Europe the yeomanry are regarded as an inferior rank of people, even to the better sort of tradesmen and mechanics, and in all parts of Europe to the great merchants and master manufacturers.It can seldom happen, therefore, that a man of any considerable stock should quit the superior in order to place himself in an inferior station.Even in the present state of Europe, therefore, little stock is likely to go from any other profession to the improvement of land in the way of farming.More does perhaps in Great Britain than in any other country, though even there the great stocks which are, in some places, employed in farming have generally been acquired by farming, the trade, perhaps, in which of all others stock is commonly acquired most slowly.After small proprietors, however, rich and great farmers are, in every country, the principal improvers.There are more such perhaps in England than in any other European monarchy.In the republican governments of Holland and of Berne in Switzerland, the farmers are said to be not inferior to those of England.
The ancient policy of Europe was, over and above all this, unfavourable to the improvement and cultivation of land, whether carried on by the proprietor or by the farmer; first, by the general prohibition of the exportation of corn without a special licence, which seems to have been a very universal regulation;and secondly, by the restraints which were laid upon the inland commerce, not only of corn, but of almost every other part of the produce of the farm by the absurd laws against engrossers, regrators, and forestallers, and by the privileges of fairs and markets.It has already been observed in what manner the prohibition of the exportation of corn, together with some encouragement given to the importation of foreign corn, obstructed the cultivation of ancient Italy, naturally the most fertile country in Europe, and at that time the seat of the greatest empire in the world.To what degree such restraints upon the inland commerce of this commodity, joined to the general prohibition of exportation, must have discouraged the cultivation of countries less fertile and less favourably circumstanced, it is not perhaps very easy to imagine.