But no one has seriously set himself to show how a system in such direct antagonism to all our existing institutions and habits--a system tantamount to a retrogression of three hundred years in our history, is to be engrafted on the laws of Great Britain. Some writers, indeed, are fond of referring obscurely to the great measures of Prince Hardenberg and Von Stein in Prussia, and to their beneficial results, as if they formed a precedent and argument for the creation of peasant estates in this country. But every one who has made himself acquainted with the true nature and purpose of the change introduced by those ministers--which was merely a commutation of certain burdens on the beneficiary owners of the land--knows that no such change is possible in Britain, simply because there are no such burdens to commute.[32] An isolated experiment of such plantations may be tried here and there, and by artificial culture may be kept up for a time: but it can have no permanent influence on the nation at large. Acts of Parliament cannot make us forget what we have learnt, and relapse into the condition our fathers were in before the Revolution. We cannot retrace our steps at will, and fall back upon some imaginary stage of our past history, when contentment and rude simplicity are supposed to have overspread the land. Examples there are, no doubt, of nations once great and opulent, whose arts, inventions, and civilisation, are now almost forgotten. But changes like these are not studiously brought about by the politic enactments of rulers, but by indirect causes of decay; and a people that has once begun to go back in civilisation must gradually sink into indigence and barbarism. Whether our past advancement, then, has been for good or for evil, it is now too late to retreat. The progress of a society, composed chiefly of peasant landowners, resembles the motion of an eddy at the margin of a great stream--slowly circling for ever in the same narrow round. We, more daring than others, have ventured out into the very centre of the flood where the current rolls strongest; and to stand still now is as impossible as to breast the Spey when the winter's snows are melting on the Grampians.