1864.
AT. 60.

020

LIFE OF OOBDEN. [omar

peasantry is entirely divorced from the land? He now
said :—“Tf I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of
being unhappily twice that number of years, I would take
Adam Smith in hand—1I would not go beyond him, I would
have no politics in it~I would take Adam Smith in hand,
and I would have a League for free trade in land just a8
we had a League for free trade in corn. You will find
just the same authority in Adam Smith for one as for the
other; and if it were taken up, as it must be taken up to
succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist
notion, but taken up on politico-economical grounds, the
agitation would be certain to succeed.” What it was that
he precisely meant by free trade in land he did not more
particularly specify. His reference to Adam Smith i
enough to show that he contemplated the abolition of
entails and other artificial means of tying land up in long
settlements ; and like all men of sense, he constantly advocated
 improved facilities in the machinery of transfer.
How much further he was prepared to go, we cannot tell;
but there is no evidence that, in England and Scotland, he
was inclined to favour the French system of compulsory
partition, and there is abundant evidence that he was pot
likely to sympathize with any of the vague projects for what
their authors call the nationalization of the land. On the
other hand, it is probable that he would have been friendly
bo the legislative recognition, not only in Ireland but in Great
Britain, of the principle of Tenant Right. In ome of the
most effective of his speeches in the time of the Corn Law,
which has been already referred to (see above, vol. i. p. 320),
he insisted upon security of tenure as the first condition of
prosperity alike to landlord, tenant, and labourer. This
security he expected to find in leases, that should contain
¥ Speeches, ii. 116,
Speeches, ii. 367. See Wealth of Nations, Bk. iii., chap. ii.