'the disinclination of young men of the yeoman farmer class to take permanent service is very general in this district, and is easily explained by the ease with which men in the prime of their strength obtain occupation as labourers in the fisheries. The great bulk of the day labourers do not seek with any great eagerness for work in the fields, so long as they hold previously acquired means sufficient to provide them with the necessaries of life, however scantily. As a rule, so long as want does not look in at the window, they will not engage themselves for such work, except at very good wages. The wages for a yearly labourer have doubled during the last twenty years.[11] At the same time the houseman has lost the command he previously had over his workmen, and consequently does not get the same amount of work out of them as formerly. Fishing attracts labour by a larger immediate return, acquired with less bodily exertion than in husbandry. It gives the population less taste for harder work.' We leave Mr. Laing in doubt whether the steam-engine could 'ever be brought to perfection.' That doubt was speedily removed, and in 1852 Norway followed in the wake of other European nations by building railways, their total length in 1883 having reached very little short of a thousand English miles. Nor did their construction, with capital raised chiefly abroad and punctually repaid, arrest the improvement or the laying down of ordinary roads, to the extent of 4000 miles, between 1845 and 1875. In addition to this extensive opening-out of communication by rail and road, the introduction of steamers on inland waters and their employment as coasters and sea-going vessels, the construction of telegraphs, and development of fisheries, of ship building, of banking and other companies, and generally of trade and industry, produced gradually a wide disturbance in the social economy found by Mr. Laing. The expansion and prosperity of the towns, as well as the more refined habits of life adopted by the clergy and the officials of Government, were viewed by the yeomen farmers with a jealousy that was undoubtedly the original cause of their present radical proclivities, the old conservatism being relegated to towns, contrary to the experience of other European countries, and particularly to that of Great Britain, until the metaphorical three acres and a cow were dangled before the eyes of its rural population. Under all these influences, and we may include among them the effect of a constantly-increasing number of travellers, equipped with the modern appliances of civilization, and demanding accommodation and other material comforts of a more and more superior character, the Robinson Crusoe existence of the yeoman farmer, as depicted by Mr. Laing, has suffered so much invasion that it has well-nigh disappeared.