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THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF

of the number of cottagers and other small occupiers of land;an event which has in every part of Europe been the imme-diate forerunner of improvement and better cultivation, butwhich at the same time may have contributed to raise theprice of those articles, both somewhat sooner and somewhatfaster than it would otherwise have risen. As the poorestfamily can often maintain a cat or a dog without anyexpense, so the poorest occupiers of land can commonlymaintain a few poultry, or a sow and a few pigs, at verylittle. The little offals of their own table, their whey,skimmed milk, and butter-milk, supply those animals with apart of their food, and they find the rest in the neighbouringfields without doing any sensible damage to any body. Bydiminishing the number of those small occupiers, therefore,the quantity of this sort of provisions, which is thus pro-duced at little or no expense, must certainly have been agood deal diminished, and their price must consequentlyhave been raised both sooner and faster than it would other-wise have risen. Sooner or later, however, in the progressof improvement, it must at any rate have risen to the utmostheight of which it is capable of rising; or to the price whichpays the labour and expense of cultivating the land whichfurnishes them with food, as well as these are paid upon thegreater part of other cultivated land.

The business of the dairy, like the feeding of hogs andpoultry, is originally carried on as a save-all. The cattlenecessarily kept upon the farm, produce more milk thaneither the rearing of their own young, or the consumption ofthe farmer’s family requires; and they produce most at oneparticular season. But of all the productions of land, milkis perhaps the most perishable. In the warm season, whenit is most abundant, it will scarce keep four-and-twentyhours. The farmer, by making it into fresh butter, stores asmall part of it for a week; by making it into salt butter, fora year; and by making it into cheese, he stores a muchgreater part of it for several years. Part of all these is re-served for tlyj use of his own family. The rest goes to mar-ket, in order to find the best price which is to be had, andwhich can scarce be so low as to discourage him from send-ing thither whatever is over and above the use of his ownfamily. If it is very low indeed, he will be likely to managehis dairy in a very slovenly and dirty manner, and willscarce perhaps think it worth while to have a particular room