gly
attested by his heavy and growing indebtedness. He may now, in fact, be
classed with the proverbially derided Fife laird, owning 'A wee bit of
land, a great lump of debt, and a dookit.'[22]

Such being the result of our enquiries into the economic condition of
the great bulk of the yeoman farmers of Norway, the ideal fabric reared
by Mr. Laing at a time when the Norse old world was still asleep, falls
utterly to the ground, and there remains but one of his statements that
we can with any advantage submit to the earnest attention of our
readers, namely, that '_A single fact brought home from such a country
is worth a volume of speculations._' We go further and say, that facts
in relation to the question of land tenure collected in any other part
of Europe are of equally inestimable value; and they have already been
supplied in great abundance from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and
Switzerland.[23] Nothing can truly be more fatal to the successful
solution of such intricate problems than the relief of the agricultural
distress of England and Scotland, or the satisfaction of the alleged
earth-hunger of the Celtic population of Ireland, than to initiate
legislation on the hypothesis that circumstances alter cases, and that
our own country can with impunity be withdrawn from the operation of
economic laws that have asserted their supremacy throughout the entire
Continent of Europe.

As history repeats itself, so are the laws of civilized development both
general and inexorable. Even in the extreme case of Russia, it has been
proved, in an article we published a few years ago,[24] that a heavy and
ruinous price has been paid for the emancipation of the serfs on a
Socialistic and partly Communistic basis, and on the erroneous
assumption, that the continued existence of the 'Mir' (the ancient
village community even of India) was an institution indigenous to the
country itself, and therefore worthy of being perpetuated by
legislation. Millions of a rural population, freed from personal
servitude, were chained anew to the land by the indebtedness incurred in
the expropriation of the lords of the soil. The allotments, averaging
ten acres, parcelled out among them in 1861, were estimated to be
sufficiently large and productive to provide not only for their support,
but also, firstly, for the payment of the 'redemption dues' with which
the allotted lands were charged for a limited period of years at an
average rate of only 1