“It’s a fine thing to be a great farmer,” cried another. “There’s Mr. Malton, who has so much land that it takes him hours to ride through it—he is able to get as much more as he likes because he is rich. Parliament never asks whether the land he wants belongs to anybody else, or whether he has not enough already, but as soon as ever he wishes for more, he gets it.” “Remember that he pays for it,” said a neighbour. “He takes no unfair advantage of anybody. You have no reason to complain, for you have no right of common; and if we who have choose to exchange ours for a bit of land, what is that to anybody but ourselves? I say it is very wrong in you to make your neighbours discontented without reason.” “You say so,” retorted the other, “because you hope to get work under the surveyors. I hear you have hired yourself out as a labourer already, and I wonder you choose to have any thing to do with such a business. If my boy had the offer of work on this spot to-morrow, he should not take it.” “Then somebody would soon be found to take it instead,” replied the neighbour. “It will be a happy chance for many of our labourers; and I do not believe anybody will be the worse in the end for Mr. Malton’s being richer.” “How should that be, if he takes the money out of our pockets?” “That is the very thing that I deny. I say he puts money into our pockets in return for our labour; and out of the ground and our labour together, he gets back more money than he paid to us. So that he grows richer without making us poorer.” When we joined the gentlemen who were talking with the surveyors, Mr. Malton was observing that he was sorry, but not very much surprised to remark how much discontent existed among the people on account of this new proceeding. “One cannot expect,” said Sir Henry Withers, “that they should look forward beyond the present inconvenience to the future profits in which they will share with us. All that they think about now is, that their cows cannot feed where they have fed; but if they could see how, in a hundred years, a multitude of their descendants will be supported by the produce of your fields, and how the value of the land will be increased by my plantations, they would wonder at their own complaints.”