This is certainly the opinion anyone will come to if he only visits thoroughly the island and looks attentively to its soil--to say nothing of the Quenvais where, in Quayle’s time, there was “an Arabian desert” of sands and hillocks covering about seventy acres (p. 24), with a little better but still very poor soil in the north and west of it. The fertility of the soil has entirely been made, first, by the _vraic_ (sea-weeds), upon which the inhabitants have maintained communal rights; later on, by considerable shipments of manure, in addition to the manure of the very considerable living stock which is kept in the island; and finally, by an admirably good cultivation of the soil. Much more than sunshine and good soil, it was the conditions of land-tenure and the low taxation which contributed to the remarkable development of agriculture in Jersey. First of all, the people of the Isles know but little of the tax-collector. While the English pay, in taxes, an average of 50s. per head of population; while the French peasant is over-burdened with taxes of all imaginable descriptions; and the Milanese peasant has to give to the Treasury full 30 per cent. of his income--all taxes paid in the Channel Islands amount to but 10s. per head in the town parishes and to much less than that in the country parishes. Besides, of indirect taxes, none are known but the 2s. 6d. paid for each gallon of imported spirits and 9d. per gallon of imported wine. As to the conditions of land-tenure, the inhabitants have happily escaped the action of Roman Law, and they continue to live under the _coutumier de Normandie_ (the old Norman common law). Accordingly, more than one-half of the territory is owned by those who themselves till the soil; there is no landlord to watch the crops and to raise the rent before the farmer has ripened the fruit of his improvements; there is nobody to charge so much for each cart-load of sea-weeds or sand taken to the fields; everyone takes the amount he likes, provided he cuts the weeds at a certain season of the year, and digs out the sand at a distance of sixty yards from the high-water mark. Those who buy land for cultivation can do so without becoming enslaved to the money-lender. One-fourth part only of the permanent rent which the purchaser undertakes to pay is capitalised and has to be paid down on purchase (often less than that), the remainder being a perpetual rent in wheat which is valued in Jersey at fifty to fifty-four _sous de France_ per cabot. To seize property for debt is accompanied with such difficulties that it is seldom resorted to (Quayle’s _General View_, pp. 41-46). Conveyances of land are simply acknowledged by both parties on oath, and cost nearly nothing. And the laws of inheritance are such as to preserve the homestead, notwithstanding the debts that the father may have run into (_ibid._, pp. 35-41).