[25] "For the exercise of the student's writing, let him sometimes _translate Latin into English_. But by all means obtain, if you can, that he be not employed in making _Latin_ themes and declamations, and, least of all, verses of any kind. Latin is a language foreign in this country, and long since dead everywhere--a language in which your son, it is a thousand to one, shall never have occasion once to make a speech as long as he lives, after he comes to be a man; and a language in which the manner of expressing one's-self is so far different from ours, that, to be perfect in that, would very little improve the purity and facility of his English style. I can see no pretence for this sort of exercise in our schools, unless it can be supposed that the making of set Latin speeches should be the way to teach men to speak well in English extempore. Still more is to be said against young men making Latin verses. If any one thinks poetry a desirable quality in his son, and that the study of it would raise his fancy and parts, he must needs yet confess that, to that end, _reading_ the excellent Greek and Roman poets is of more use than _making bad verses of his own in a language that is not his own_. And he whose design it is to read in English poetry would not, I guess, think the way to it was to make his first essays in Latin verses."--LOCKE _on Education_, § 169, 174. [26] _Spectator_, No. 407; _Addison's Works_, iv. 327. [27] _Observations_, p. 158. [28] See _Blackwood's Magazine_, vol. lvii. p. 529. [29] _Observations_, p. 24. [30] The paternal care which our Government takes of agriculture leaves us to grope our way by mere guess-work in all statistical questions affecting it. For want of a better guide, we may refer to Mr M'Culloch's often-quoted estimates, according to which, it would appear, that there is one labourer to each 13-1/2 acres of arable land in England, one to each 19-5/7 acres in Scotland--almost exactly the proportion assumed by Mr Laing. [31] _Observations_, p. 39. [32] Previous to Hardenberg's administration, the peasants enjoyed the _dominium utile_ of their lands, (_bauern hofe_, as they were called,) but subject to the payment of a certain quit-rent or feu-duty to the superior lord; and the scope of the change was to make these quit-rents redeemable, by the cession of a certain fixed proportion of the land and to vest the absolute property of the remainder in the vassal. It is obvious, therefore, that there is not the slightest analogy between the case of the Prussian feuar (as we should call him in Scotland) and that of an ordinary tenant-at-will or lessee of land, and that the commutation we have described has no similarity whatever to the schemes of "tenant-right," of which we now hear so much.