Arrived in England, we find there everywhere the same tendency towards
centralization. Of the 200,000 small landed proprietors of the days of
Adam Smith but few remain, and of even those the number is gradually
diminishing. Great landed estates have everywhere absentees for owners,
agents for managers, and day laborers for workmen. The small landowner was
a resident, and had a personal interest in the details of the
neighborhood, not now felt by either the owner or the laborer. This state
of things existed to a considerable extent five-and-thirty years ago, but
it has since grown with great rapidity. At that time Great Britain could
exhibit to the world perhaps as large a body of men and women of letters,
with world-wide reputation, as ever before existed in any country or
nation, as will be seen from the following list:--


Byron, Wilson, Clarkson,
Moore, Hallam, Landor,
Scott, Roscoe, Wellington,[1]
Wordsworth, Malthus, Robert Hall,
Rogers, Ricardo, Taylor,
Campbell, Mill, Romilly,
Joanna Baillie, Chalmers, Edgeworth,
Southey, Coleridge, Hannah More,
Gifford, Heber, Dalton,
Jeffrey, Bentham, Davy,
Sydney Smith, Brown, Wollaston,
Brougham, Mackintosh, The Herschels,
Horner, Stewart, Dr. Clarke.


[Footnote 1: Wellington's dispatches place him in the first rank of