You require advice; and although it is very much against the grain with me to take up the pen, yet, out of my regard for you, and for those that went before you, I am constrained to address you on the topics touched upon in your _High Farming Vindicated, and further Illustrated_. Be thankful, my dear sir, that the operator is not the Editor of _Blackwood_. I will handle you tenderly, and, if the cautery is indispensable, will remember the quaint and gentle old Izaak's instruction to the angler, when directing him how to fix the frog on the hook--"In so doing, use him as though you loved him." There are some delusions under which you are labouring, that I must, in the first instance, set myself to remove. In your introductory paragraph, you express your astonishment that your first pamphlet, of some thirty pages, should have formed the subject of so much discussion, and have originated violent controversies, and been productive, to use your own awkwardly-rustic metaphor, of "a whole sheaf of pamphlets," (p. 3-4.) Well, I wonder too: but it is not the first time that dire events have sprung from trivial causes; and you seem strangely blind to the real origin of the popularity that attended your first essay. In your _High Farming Vindicated_, you describe its predecessor as "chiefly a narrative of the system pursued by a practical farmer in your neighbourhood, which that gentleman had found highly remunerative." Had this been all, the _brochure_ would have attracted little notice, and caused no discussion. But this is not a correct account of its object and scope. The titlepage--_High Farming under Liberal Covenants, the best Substitute for Protection_--is a true exponent of the object of the author. The very titlepage acted like magic. For mark at the moment when you launched your bantling into the world. The agricultural depression was grievous; prices were sinking daily; the farmers saw their capital disappearing, and ruin apparently staring them in the face; and, in the emergency, you step forward, and offer them an infallible panacea in your _High Farming the best Substitute for Protection_. There never was anything so opportune. The suffering farmers flew to you, read you greedily, and arose from the perusal angry that they were so trifled with, and with a conviction that your _High Farming_ as a substitute for protection, and a cure for their sufferings, was a mere quackish nostrum.