One who looks at the subject for the first time, and whose beau-ideal of agricultural perfection is formed on the pattern of Norfolk or Haddington, finds some difficulty in believing that a country cut up into small "laird-ships" of from five to twenty acres, can be advantageously cultivated at all. He naturally takes it for granted that, as regards efficiency of labour and quantity of produce, the large scale must always have the advantage of the smaller; and that the spade and the flail can, in the long run, have no more chance in competition with the Tweeddale plough and Crosskill's steam thrashing-machine, than a dray-horse with Flying Dutchman. And in England, or any country similarly circumstanced, his conclusion would no doubt be perfectly correct; and yet a visit to Flanders, Holstein, or the Palatinate, will convince him that the boorish-looking owners of the patches of farms he finds there, with the clumsiest implements, and, to his eyes, most uncouth ways of working, do somehow contrive to raise crops which he, with all his costly engines, and the last new wrinkle from Baldoon or Tiptree Hall, cannot pretend to match. Their superiority as to the cereal grains is perhaps questionable; but, looking to the quantity of produce generally, no impartial observer can doubt that, after making every allowance for difference of soil and climate, a given area of land in Belgium _yields more food_ than the same extent in England. How is this to be accounted for? Let us hear Mr Laing's explanation. "The clean state of the crops here (in Flanders)--not a weed in a mile of country, for they are all hand-weeded out of the land, and applied for fodder or manure--the careful digging of every corner which the plough cannot reach; the headlands and ditch-slopes, down to the water-edge, and even the circle round single trees close up to the stem, being all dug, and under crop of some kind--show that the stock of people, to do all this minute handwork, must be very much greater than the land employs with us. The rent-paying farmer, on a nineteen years' lease, could not afford eighteen-pence or two shillings a-day of wages for doing such work, because it never could make him any adequate return. But to the _owner of the soil_ it is worth doing such work by his own and his family's labour at odd hours; because it is adding to the perpetual fertility and value of his own property.... His piece of land to him is his savings-bank, in which the value of his labour is hoarded up, to be repaid him at a future day, and secured to his family after him."[29]