144. Let me break off here for a moment to point out to my readers the truly excellent conduct of Lord WINCHILSEA and Lord STANHOPE, who, as I read, have taken great pains to make the labourers on their estates comfortable, by allotting to each a piece of ground sufficient for the keeping of a cow. I once, when I lived at Botley, proposed to the copyholders and other farmers in my neighbourhood, that we should petition the Bishop of Winchester, who was lord of the manors thereabouts, to grant titles to all the numerous persons called _trespassers on the wastes_; and also to give titles to others of the poor parishioners, who were willing to make, on the skirts of the wastes, enclosures not exceeding an acre each. This I am convinced, would have done a great deal towards relieving the parishes, then greatly burdened by men out of work. This would have been better than digging holes one day to fill them up the next. Not a single man would agree to my proposal! One, a bullfrog farmer (now, I hear, pretty well sweated down,) said it would only make them _saucy_! And one, a true disciple of _Malthus_, said, that to facilitate their rearing of children _was a harm_! This man had, at the time, in his own occupation, land that had formerly been _six farms_, and he had, too, ten or a dozen children. I will not mention names; but this farmer will _now_, perhaps, have occasion to call to mind what I told him on that day, when his opposition, and particularly the ground of it, gave me the more pain, as he was a very industrious, civil, and honest man. Never was there a greater mistake than to suppose that men are made saucy and idle by just and kind treatment. _Slaves_ are always lazy and saucy; nothing but the lash will extort from them either labour or respectful deportment. I never met with a _saucy_ Yankee (New Englander) in my life. Never servile; always civil. This must necessarily be the character of _freemen living in a state of competence_. They have nobody to envy; nobody to complain of; they are in good humour with mankind. It must, however, be confessed, that very little, comparatively speaking, is to be accomplished by the individual efforts even of benevolent men like the two noblemen before mentioned. They have a strife to maintain against the _general tendency of the national state of things_. It is by general and indirect means, and not by partial and direct and positive regulations, that so great a good as that which they generously aim at can be accomplished. When we are to see such means adopted, God only knows; but, if much longer delayed, I am of opinion, that they will come too late to prevent something very much resembling a dissolution of society.