This is the secret of the marvellous industry that has converted even the barren sands and marshes of these districts into one continuous garden. It has been accomplished by what, for want of a better expression, we may call spontaneous, in opposition to hired labour. The labourer is himself the owner of the soil, and to one so circumstanced work assumes quite a different aspect; the spade goes deeper, the scythe takes a wider sweep, and the muscles lift a heavier burden. No agricultural chemistry is so potent as the sense of property. The incentive to his daily toil is not the dismal vision of a parish workhouse in the background, but an ever-fresh hope for the days that are before him. His fare may be hard, his clothing coarse, and indulgences rarely procurable; but his abstinence is voluntary--"_et saltem pauperies abest_." There can be no doubt that a much larger proportion of the population will find employment and subsistence from the land under this system than under ours. Mr Laing illustrates this by supposing the case of an estate in Scotland of 1600 arable acres divided into eight farms of 200 acres each; and he assumes that the labour employed on each of these farms, taking one season with another, is equivalent to that of ten people all the year round--an estimate which is not far from the truth on a well-managed farm.[30] Such an estate of 1600 acres will thus afford constant employment to eighty labourers. "Now take under your eye a space of land here, in Flanders, that you judge to be about 1600 acres. Walk over it, examine it. Every foot of the land is cultivated--dug with the spade or hoe where horse and plough cannot work; and all is in crop, or in preparation for crop. In our best farmed districts there are corners and patches in every field lying waste and uncultivated, because the large rent-paying farmers cannot afford labour, superintendence, and manure, for such minute portions of land and garden-like work as the owner of a small piece of land can bestow on every corner and spot of his own property. Here the whole 1600 acres must be in garden-farms of five or six acres; and it is evident that in the amount of produce from the land, in the crops of rye, wheat, barley, rape, clover, lucern, and flax for clothing material, which are the usual crops, the 1600 acres under such garden-culture surpass the 1600 acres under large-farm cultivation, as much as a kitchen-garden surpasses in productiveness a common field. On the 1600 acres here in Flanders or Belgium, instead of the eight farmers with their eighty farm-servants, there will be from three hundred to three hundred and twenty families, or from fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred individuals, each family working its own piece of land; and with some property in cows, sheep, pigs, utensils, and other stock in