“A great proprietor is seldom a great improver.” Private appropriation of land is deemed to be beneficial; because the strongest interest which the community and the human race have in the land is that it should yield the largest amount of necessary or useful things required by the community. The spectre of “excessive subdivision” of the soil, once so potent an influence, has lost all its terror. It was Cobden who wished to remove all remonstrances to the easy and economical transfer of land, and to develop a process by which, under the natural operation of a free exchange, the laborer might be re-settled on the soil from which, in his energetic and suggestive phrase, the “laborer had been divorced.” It was Mill who, in his powerful chapters on peasant proprietors, clearly showed that “free trade in land” was the condition under which the economic good of man can be best effected; that a small or peasant proprietary is the most thriving, the most industrious, the most thrifty of cultivators, and that under small free holdings the capacities of the soil are developed to the fullest possible extent, and the rate of production raised to the very largest amount. Those who fancied that peasant proprietors must be wretched cultivators have seen that some of the best agriculture in the world is to be found in Switzerland, where such properties abound.[65] These peasant proprietorships have neither bred over-population nor converted the country into a “pauper warren.” The existence of peasant properties has come to be regarded by philanthropists as eminently desirable, and the removal of all obstacles to it has become an aim of advanced politicians. Daniel Webster, in an address delivered before the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in 1821, referring to the relation of civil liberty to property, as regards its security and distribution and that the degree of its distribution settles the form of government,--aristocratic, if the property is held by the few, and popular, if held by the many,--said in reference to France: “A most interesting experiment, on the effect of a subdivision of property, is now making in France. It is understood that the law regulating the transmission of property in that country now divides it, real and personal, among all the children equally, both sons and daughters; and that is, also, a very great restraint on the power of making dispositions of property by will. It has been supposed, that the effect of this might probably be, in time, to break up the soil into such small subdivisions, that the proprietors would be too poor to resist the encroachments of executive power. I think far otherwise. In respect to this recent law of succession in France, I would, presumptuously perhaps, hazard a conjecture, that if the government do not change the law, the law in half a century will change the government; and that this change will be, not in favor of the crown, as some European writers have supposed, but against it.