Sir James Graham has no doubt of the present prosperity of agriculture, because his rents are paid. (See _Times_, 14th Feb.) This is enough for him, and the rest is all "but leather and prunella"--the mere constitutional croaking of the agricultural body. We should have liked better to have heard the views of Sir James Graham's tenantry on this department of the subject than his own. With the value of agricultural produce reduced thirty-five per cent, is the reward of his tenants' industry undiminished, and their capital unimpaired? What a draft upon the agricultural ignorance of the present House of Commons, and what a contempt for the understanding of his auditors, did this bold man evince by hazarding such an assertion! Any inquiry into the sources whence his rents were paid was not thought necessary by Sir James; and we believe that there are many more amiable men than the Laird of Netherby who are solacing themselves with the same view. Their rents are paid--their grass is letting--they are content--they eschew inquiry. The struggling farmer is pinching himself and his family, and is dipping his hand into the hard-earned savings of former years, in order that he may meet the factor. But examination would be unpleasant--dangerous; and any expression of sympathy even with the sufferer, would imply a distrust of the blessings following in the wake of the Free-trade policy. It might almost seem that many of our landed proprietors were set at present upon acting the part of the silly bird of the desert, which hid its head in the sand that it might not see the destruction that was coming. The Newark election, in which the nominee of the landlords was unceremoniously set aside by the farmers, and a man of their own choice selected, might have taught the owners of the soil that condign punishment may eventually await wilful ignorance or criminal neglect of the present duties of their station, and indifference to the condition of those whose prosperity is indissolubly associated with their own. If degradation from that position of influence and power which they have hitherto so justly and naturally possessed be thought no evil, we confess, that we would wish to see that great interest--whose importance to the welfare of the State we have ever vindicated to the best of our power--selecting a more graceful and magnanimous mode of self-destruction. The retention of an undiminished rent-roll Sir James Graham has set his heart upon, as is unblushingly implied in the speech already quoted--but this will not be allowed him; and if there be any meaning or sincerity in his own creed, he dares not ask it. The Free-trade press unanimously assert--and unanswerably upon their principles, and Sir James Graham's own--that the only and the necessary termination of agricultural distress must conduct to a reduction of rent; and the Free-trade press is stronger than Sir James Graham.