I have received with much pleasure your letter of the 6th inst, and have read with much interest your suggestions on the reform of our land laws, the great question which will demand, and I hope receive, the attention of the Parliament which will be elected in November next.

I look back with intense satisfaction on the reform of our tariff, begun by Sir Robert Peel in the year 1842, carried forward by him to the year 1846, when the odious Corn Law was condemned and abolished, and completed in after years by the great measures carried through Parliament by Mr. Gladstone. In connection with the changes in our commercial policy, the names of Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone will for ever stand foremost and highest in the list of the Ministers and statesmen of our country. They have lifted to a higher scale of independence and comfort the industrious millions of our people.

My lamented friend Mr. Cobden, who did not underrate the result of the struggle in which he had taken so eminent a part, on more than one occasion expressed the belief that the men or the Minister who should hereafter free the land of the United Kingdom from the fetters which have hitherto bound it, would confer as great a blessing on our people as that bestowed upon them by the freedom of the produce of the soil.

The time has now come when this new great land question must be discussed and settled. It is well that some plans just to the nation and not less just to the possessors of the land should be brought before the attention of our people. In the suggestions which you have submitted to me you offer such a plan, and I cannot but hope that it will receive, as I believe it will deserve, a very large measure of support throughout the country.

There have been wild schemes brought before some portions of our people, schemes not based on any just principle; your suggestions seem to me just and calculated to do good to landowner, to tenant farmer, to the industrious labourer on the soil, and to the millions whose families subsist upon its produce.

I cannot enter into anything like a great movement in connection with this question, but I hope we may soon see a movement in the constituencies and in Parliament, and that another great measure of reform may soon be added to those by which our time and our generation are already distinguished.