We might multiply the instances of land-owners or commercial enterprises which are helping the labourer to buy land, for the system of dividing the land into small allotments, selling it at a cheap price, and allowing payment by instalments, is every day becoming more widespread. The journals are full of announcements of the sale by auction of lands which, until to-day, have never felt the ploughshare, and are now given over to colonisation. One also hears men speak, as of an accomplished fact, of the method initiated by several railway-companies which propose, by means of their own capital, to bring into the market and increase the value of the vast tracts of uncultivated land which they own on the outskirts of their systems. Unhappily, in spite of this tendency to the subdivision of the soil, the most usual system of working the land is still that of letting it at a fixed rent, or for a certain proportion of the yield in place of rent, or by a profit-sharing system, under which the tenant receives 50, 40, or 30 per cent, of the harvest. The large land-owners, who are the most numerous, prefer the former method, and often impose on the farmer the obligation of leaving a crop of lucerne on the land in the last year of the tenancy. The chief drawback of this system is that the labourer never becomes the owner of the soil he cultivates, so that he is not actuated by the powerful ties of property, which should attach him to the country and its destinies. On the other hand, too, the tenant tries to obtain from the soil the largest profit he can, without troubling to consider whether he is exhausting it or not; he leaves not even a tree behind him as a monument of his tenancy. But in spite of all these drawbacks this system does furnish the colonist with means to buy land cheaply later on, and in another district. Such is the history of many farmers, who began by humbly labouring under the conditions above described, and are to-day rich land-owners, possessing enormous tracts of land, which they work in the way that they find most profitable. It is hardly necessary to say that the agricultural methods employed vary according to the situation of the farms, their fertility, and the means of communication. Agriculture, properly so called, establishes itself and spreads along the waterways or railways which facilitate the transport of the harvests. The crops principally grown cannot afford the cost of transport at a greater distance than 180 or 190 miles by railway from the nearest point of embarkation or consumption, and the nearest railway-station must not be further than 18 or 20 miles. There are only a few crops of greater value that can be profitably grown at greater distances, their higher prices covering the increased cost of transport.