Supposing the iniquitous competition and taxation to which the agricultural interests of the country are subjected were to remain permanent, we do not believe that any knowledge, or skill, or enterprise, can make the business of farming _generally_ profitable. We think, however, that on casting the horoscope of British husbandry, many writers have predicted a speedier ruin to the tenant-farmer than the nature of his employments should lead us to expect. Everything connected with the processes of husbandry is slow and operose. There is only one harvest in the year, and there can only be one annual profit or loss upon the capital invested. A farmer cannot be ruined in a season. He may have a little spare capital; and, at all events, he has capital invested in stock, and by trenching upon the one or the other, he can for a while meet his losses. Agricultural capital has, however, been already so much impaired, that if, in present circumstances, a bad crop at home were to concur with a good one in the corn-growing countries of the Continent, the coincidence, we believe, would plunge immense numbers of farmers into bankruptcy. If any easy and apathetic landlord doubts this, let him ask the country bankers. It may be difficult to predict the ultimate issue of an unbending adherence to the present system. After a period of hopeless struggle, the capital of the present race of farmers will disappear, and, degraded and ruined, they must go. Who will succeed them? Most probably a race of servile cultivators, like the helots of ancient Sparta, or the ryots and serfs of modern Europe, who, content to subsist upon the meanest fare, shall deliver over to the lord of the soil the produce of the farm. We have heard that some patriotic lairds and discerning factors, taking time by the forelock, are looking out for such clodpoles--for the race is not extinct--to occupy their vacant farms, wisely concluding that men without capital, skill, or education, will live upon black bread, and surrender to them the whole proceeds of the soil. A curious comment this upon the high-farming theory, and a plan of operations highly creditable to the agricultural sagacity and patriotic benevolence of its discoverers! Or it may be that Sir James Graham's "pasturage" may be the _dernier resort_ of a ruined agriculture, in which case we may have, as in the Australian continent, men living somewhat like gentlemen, and occupying extensive tracts of country with their flocks and shepherds. Such a result could, of course, only take place by approaches slow, insidious, and imperceptible. If it were possible, _which it is not_, that such a social revolution should be _allowed_ to take place, it is plain that it must be spread over a large period of time. We think error has been propagated by anticipations of immediate disaster. It is conceivable that events may occur that will postpone the triumph of truth, and that may enable the Free-trade press a little