The question at bottom is, whether capital in the form of tillable land is more _effective_ when held in large masses and loaned out to men, who possess small capitals in another form than land, and are willing to apply these for a return upon that land, or when held in small masses and used as capital by the owners themselves, who also own some capital in another form than land and are willing to apply this to their own profit upon their land. We hold, that the latter method is better than the former, both for the maintenance and improvement of the land itself as capital and also for the current production of commodities from it, because, (1) when one owns the farm he works, from the very nature of permanent ownership he takes a greater interest in it, perhaps he has inherited it from his fathers, perhaps he has bought it and paid for it at the hardest, at any rate it is his own, and as all men work from _motives_ and the energy of the work is proportioned to the constant press of the motives, then must the owner of the capital, whose abstinence _makes_ it capital, be under the strongest possible motive at once to improve his capital and also to make the current produce from it as great as possible, since the capital itself and all it yields is his own; moreover, (2) ownership improves the moral _character_ of the cultivators, it tends to make them industrious, thrifty, frugal, independent, hopeful of the future, anxious to give their children better privileges than they themselves had, and it would seem as if the masses of men are educated by nothing so much, at least by nothing more, as and than by the _ownership_ of land, wherever such tenure is possible and easy to the masses; and (3) the outward testimony is abundant from many lands, that the peasant proprietor _is_ a happier and more virtuous man, a more productive and progressive one, than the mere tenant and farm-laborer, while there is much perhaps less conclusive testimony that leased lands are inferior in point of improvements and productiveness to the same lands when cultivated by their owners and to contiguous or at least similar lands still so cultivated.