Were the fork used instead of the hoe; were the weeds kept down; were the manure returned to the soil, instead of festering about everywhere in sun and rain: in a word, were even as much done for the land as an English labourer does for his garden; still more, if as much were done for it as for a suburban market-garden, the produce might be doubled or trebled, and that without exhausting the soil.
The West Indian peasant can, if he will, carry 'la petite Culture' to a perfection and a wealth which it has not yet attained even in China, Japan, and Hindostan, and make every rood of ground not merely maintain its man, but its civilised man.

This, however, will require a skill and a thoughtfulness which the Negro does not as yet possess.

If he ever had them, he lost them under slavery, from the brutalising effects of a rough and unscientific 'grande culture'; and it will need several generations of training ere he recovers them.

Garden-tillage and spade-farming are not learnt in a day, especially when they depend--as they always must in temperate climates--for their main profit on some article which requires skilled labour to prepare it for the market--on flax, for instance, silk, wine, or fruits.

An average English labourer, I fear, if put in possession of half a dozen acres of land, would fare as badly as the poor Chartists who, some twenty years ago, joined in Feargus O'Connor's land scheme, unless he knew half a dozen ways of eking out a livelihood which even our squatters around Windsor and the New Forest are, alas! forgetting, under the money-making and man- unmaking influences of the 'division of labour.' He is vanishing fast, the old bee-keeping, apple-growing, basket-making, copse- cutting, many-counselled Ulysses of our youth, as handy as a sailor: and we know too well what he leaves behind him; grandchildren better fed, better clothed, better taught than he, but his inferiors in intellect and in manhood, because--whatever they may be taught--they cannot be taught by schooling to use their fingers and their wits.