Rode to the forest of Dean, up a very steep hill. The lanes here are between high banks, and on the sides of the hills the road is a rock, the water having long ago washed all the earth away. Pretty works are, I find, carried on here, as is the case in all the other _public forests_! Are these things _always_ to be carried on in this way? Here is a domain of thirty thousand acres of the finest timber-land in the world, and with coal-mines endless! Is this _worth nothing_? Cannot each acre yield ten trees a year? Are not these trees worth a pound apiece? Is not the estate worth three or four hundred thousand pounds a year? And does it yield _anything to the public_, to whom it belongs? But it is useless to waste one's breath in this way. We must have a _reform of the Parliament_: without it the whole thing will fall to pieces.--The only good purpose that these forests answer is that of furnishing a place of being to labourers' families on their skirts; and here their cottages are very neat, and the people look hearty and well, just as they do round the forests in Hampshire. Every cottage has a pig or two. These graze in the forest, and, in the fall, eat acorns and beech-nuts and the seed of the ash; for these last, as well as the others, are very full of oil, and a pig that is put to his shifts will pick the seed very nicely out from the husks. Some of these foresters keep cows, and all of them have bits of ground, cribbed, of course, at different times, from the forest: and to what better use can the ground be put? I saw several wheat stubbles from 40 rods to 10 rods. I asked one man how much wheat he had from about 10 rods. He said more than two bushels. Here is bread for three weeks, or more perhaps; and a winter's straw for the pig besides. Are these things nothing? The dead limbs and old roots of the forest give _fuel_; and how happy are these people, compared with the poor creatures about Great Bedwin and Cricklade, where they have neither land nor shelter, and where I saw the girls carrying home bean and wheat stubble for fuel! Those countries, always but badly furnished with fuel, the desolating and damnable system of paper-money, by sweeping away small homesteads, and laying ten farms into one, has literally _stripped_ of all shelter for the labourer. A farmer, in such cases, has a whole domain in his hands, and this not only to the manifest injury of the public at large, but in _open violation of positive law_. The poor forger is hanged; but where is the prosecutor of the monopolizing farmer, though the _law_ is as clear in the one case as in the other? But it required this infernal system to render every wholesome regulation nugatory; and to reduce to such abject misery a people famed in all ages for the goodness of their food and their dress. There is one farmer, in the North of Hampshire, who has nearly eight thousand acres of land in his hands; who grows fourteen hundred acres of wheat and two