On large and small farms, and their influence on the social economy : including a view of the progress of the division of the soil in France since 1815

LIBRARY

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORN

Class"

ON

LARGE AND SMALL FARMS,

AND THEIR

INFLUENCE ON THE SOCIAL ECONOMY ;

INCLUDIWO

A VIEW

OF THE PROGRESS OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOIL IN FRANCE
SINCE 1815.

H. PASSY,

! K.VN'CE, MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE, EX-MINISTER OV
COMMERCE, OF FINANCE, &C. &C.

WITH NOTES.

Les Economistes Anglais ont 1'esprit fausse en matiere de
propriety et de culture.

. MAD. DE STAEL.

LONDON : ARTHUR HALL & CO.

EDINBURGH: OLIVER & BOYD. GLASGOW: F. ORR & SONS,
CUPAR-FIFE : G. S. TULLIS,

MJ/CCCXLVIIl.
>"*\7l B R

r*.

CL-l'AR-FIFF. : PRINTED AT THE ST. ANDREWS rXIVERSITY PRESS,
BY Q. S. TULtlS.

JOHN BRIGHT, ESQ., M.R

ENLIGHTENED) AND UNCOMPHOMIs I X< • \ 1 1 \ t M • ATE OF POPUL All
RIGHTS,

THESE PAGES

ARE, WITH PERMISSION, RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED

THE TRANSLATOR.

II

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

As the work, of which an English version is
now offered to the public, is in some measure
the sequel of another by the same Author, a few
words from the Translator, in regard to the
latter, may not seem out of place.

In 1826, the Government of the Restoration,
in carrying out, under the Vilelle Ministry, its
retrograde policy, brought forward a measure
for changing the law of succession as fixed at
the Revolution, and for partially re-establishing
the ancieA; laws of Primogeniture and Entail.
This project, which excited great dissatisfac-
tion, was started in the Chamber of Peers, and
rejected by a great majority. Among the pub-
lications which the. agitation of this great ques-
tion gave rise to, was one from the pen of M.
Passy, entitled, " Aristocracy Considered in its
Relations with the Progress of Civilisation ;"
in which, after exposing at length the many
social and political evils which result to a
country from the existence of an aristocracy of
the soil, factitiously supported by Primogeni-

ii PREFACE.

ture and Entails, he showed the immense advan-
tages that had accrued to France from the
abolition of these laws of privilege, and the
action of her existing law of succession, esta-
blishing a rule of equal division. In his preface
to this treatise (a translation of which is now
being prepared for separate publication), the
author states : —

" It may be a matter of surprise to some not to
find in this treatise a special examination of the so
much agitated question of small and large properties,
and farming on a small and great scale. If I have
omitted this question, it is because there seemed to me
to be no proper connexion between the size of estates
and that of farms. Like all other industries, agricul-
ture depends for its modes and forms, and for its ad-
vancement, on a number of causes, among which the
state of the sciences and the manufacturing arts, the
abundance and circulation of capital, and the amount
of the population, hold the most important rank.
Like all other industries, if it prospers under laws
favourable to the protection of property and persons,
to the free use of capital, lands, and individual enter-
prise, it declines under unjust and restrictive laws,
which tend to keep the inferior classes in ignorance
and poverty. Like all other industries, it seeks out
and takes for itself the modes and forms at once the
most advantageous for those who are engaged in it
and for society at large.

" It would certainly not have been difficult to sup-
port here the above views by unquestionable proofs,

PREFACE. Ill

but that would not have been sufficient. So numerous
are the debateable points embraced in this single
question of rural economy, that I would have been
forced to enter into a labyrinth of discussions and con-
troversies almost without end ; and it would have been
necessary to refute, in a hasty manner, doctrines,
opinions, and intricate objections, the errors of which,
having their origin in principles of political economy,
partially elucidated or imperfectly understood, could
only have been clearly exposed by a very extensive
investigation of these principles themselves. Such a
labour required a separate work, an entire treatise;
and how could I enter upon it here, without distract-
ing the attention of the reader, and withdrawing it
from considerations of a higher and more urgent
kind ? Other times will leave me, I hope, the leisure
necessary for availing myself of the materials which
I have collected for elucidating this question."

After a lapse of nearly twenty years, the
Author proceeded to realise the hope which
he had expressed, by laying before the Section of
the Institute, of which he is a member, the pre-
sent work in the form of a Memoir, and soon
after publishing it, with a Supplement, in the
" Journal des Economistes" (Nos. 34, 38, 40,
57), a periodical of which he is one of the editors,
and from whose pages this translation has been
made.

The deep importance of the economical ques-
tion discussed in the present treatise is too gene-
rally recognised to need being pointed out. The

IV PREFACE.

work may be considered as an answer to Arthur
Young, M'Culloch, and some other English
economists ; and how far the eminent author has
been successful in his attempted refutation of
these writers, the reader will be able to judge.

MEMOIB,

READ BEFORE THE FRENCH ACADEMY OF MORAL
AND POLITICAL SCIENCES,

ON 24TH AUGUST 1844. _,*'-'

W

INTRODUCTION.

IT is nearly a century since the controversy respect-
ing the size of farms first arose. At that period,
the progress of society had begun to attract attention
to the majority of questions of a financial and admi-
nistrative order; and the appearance of numerous
publications bespoke the ardour with which inquiry
was being directed into all that related to taxation,
money, trade, and industrial policy. The time was,
therefore, at hand, when agriculture — whose impor-
tance had been long before pointed out by Palissy,
Oliver de Serres, and Sully — was anew to become a
popular subject of investigation. Everything, in fact,
more especially the changes which continued to be
made in the rural districts of the countries the most
forward in Europe, proved the advancement of this
science. To tenants-at-will and metayers, recently
freed from the yoke of predial servitude, and still too
poor to furnish the funds which farming requires,
succeeded farmers, who, taking the lands in lease for
a terms of years, cultivated them by means of their

A 2

own capitals, and who, after paying their rents out of
the produce, remained the sole owners of the surplus.
Here was a considerable innovation : according as it
took effect, agriculture, practised by men more inde-
pendent and enterprising, increased in prosperity ;
and economists were soon found, who, struck with its
productive powers, considered it not merely as the
principal, but as the only, source of wealth.

Such an opinion was not long in being propagated
by the celebrated school formed in France under the
auspices of Dr Quesnay, and which counted in its
ranks so many original and able thinkers. According
to the theory of this school, the earth alone has the
power of remunerating the efforts of man. Owing to
its own inherent fecundity, and to the entirely gratui-
tous action of the natural agents, which aid the de-
velopment of its powers, it alone reproduces an amount
of value exceeding what is consumed by those through
whose labour the returns are obtained. So fine an
attribute belongs neither to manufactures nor trade,
that merely develop or transform the substances
drawn from the soil, without possessing any creative
power, so that the wealth of communities solely de-
pends on the amount of the net proceeds which
they draw from their agricultural labours.

Such maxims had the good effect, at least, of excit-
ing a lively interest in everything relating to rural
economy. The Physiocratic school accordingly made
agriculture the subject of a careful study ; and shortly
extended its inquiries to the effects resulting from the
size of possessions, and the modes of management.
In I7y>5, this question was handled in a work, now

justly fallen into neglect, but which, at the time of
its publication, made a deep impression. This was
" The Friend of Man" of the Marquis de Mirabeau.
Five editions, thrown off in less than six years, prove
the eagerness with which the work was read ; and to
the stirring effect which it produced we are indebted
for the first establishment of agricultural societies in
France. (Note I.) The Marquis de Mirabeau de-
nounced those vast domains, given over, as he asserted,
totenants-at-will, or to indolent stewards, charged with
furnishing the means of dissipation and luxury to
their owners, passing their lives in towns, and too
proud to look after their estates. The territory of a
country, added he, can never be too much broken
down ; it is this subdivision which gives all its vita-
lity to a State ; and he relates having himself made a
trial of it, by dividing a large field among several
peasants, who had become independent upon their
allotments, and had doubled the rent previously drawn
from the property. (Note II.) Several causes contri-
buted to procure for the opinions of the Marquis de
Mirabeau a favourable hearing. First, In the eyes
of the well-educated classes, they had the merit of
being in accordance with classical notions — with the
traditions of Greece and Rome, that were all in fa-
vour of moderate fortunes and small patrimonies.
In the second place, they came in aid of the demo-
cratic ideas which then began to prevail in society.
Finally, they were mixed up and associated with
schemes and plans of political reforms, whose realisa-
tion was eagerly desired. Thus did they meet with
the most cordial reception ; and so eagerly were they

8

caught at, that in 1789 there were found Bailwicks,
which, in the instructions given to their deputies to
the States- General, requested that coercive measures
might be taken for restricting the size of farms.

About the same period, in England, doctrines of an
entirely opposite nature had taken root, and these
also were founded on a course of experience, which
had reached its acme. Counting from the peace of
Utrecht, England had rapidly advanced in that in-
dustrial career, of which the peculiarities of her topo-
graphical situation insured the success — trade, ship-
ping, and manufactures absorbed that ardent and exu-
berant energy, which sixty years of wars and civil
dissensions had engendered in the mind of the na-
tion. Great industrial works, and even whole manu-
facturing towns, everywhere sprung up; the sea-ports
were crowded with vessels ; industry and wealth were
increasing by the most palpable signs, and never did
a social transformation take place with such rapidity
as that of which England was then the theatre.

In the midst of so general and rapid a movement,
it was impossible that agriculture could remain sta-
tionary. Every thing co-operated to communicate to
it a successful impulse. The price of landed produce
rose in the vicinity of populous towns ; pasture lands
yielded a higher return, inasmuch as the provision-
ing of the shipping, and the increased comfort of the
people, augmented the demand for their produce ; and
large profits were made by all those farmers whose
farms, favoured by nature and situation, enabled them
to satisfy the most easily the new demands of the
consumers.

9

The facts above noticed, produced a great and sud-
den change in the organisation of farms. Two
centuries before, the increased profit on wool was suffi-
cient to modify suddenly the rural economy of
England ; this time, the transformation was neither
less rapid nor complete. In presence of the ancient
cultivators, too poor or too ignorant to enter upon the
improvements which the circumstances of the times
called for, were found farmers, who were able to join
the advantage of education to those of wealth. The
latter, confident in the tried power of their intelli-
gence and their capitals, offered so high rents for the
lands exposed to let, as to insure their obtaining
leases of them ; in their hands took place a union of
farms, a part of the arable land on which was turned
into pasture; and, in the greater number of localities,
a single cultivator came to occupy the place of a body
of petty tenants. It was in vain that poets and moral-
ists tried to propitiate the landlords in favour of their
old tenants, thus extruded from the homes where their
forefathers had dwelt, and forced to seek a livelihood
in the towns, or serve in the districts where they had
resided as masters ; nothing could put a stop to a
change, of which the advantages were immediate and
certain, and large farms became more and more
general.

Under the operation of this new system, English
agriculture was not long in changing its aspect. The
new and energetic generation that had taken possession
of the soil displayed in its labours an immense su-
periority over the preceding. Everywhere the
animals reared for labour or sale multiplied, and the

10

fields, placed under a better system of management,
furnished more ample returns. The advantages
resulting from the creation of large farms became
obvious to the most careless observer ; and when
Arthur Young declared that they exhibited the best
mode of cultivation, he met with few among his
countrymen to gainsay him.

Arthur Young had begun his career by cultivating,
with indifferent success, a small estate belonging to
his family. At a later period of his life, a second
attempt, in the same way, had been followed by the
like results. Tired of these ruinous experiments, he
resolved to quit the practice of farming for the teach-
ing of it. Possessed of a large stock of information,
and an acute observer, his works were generally read ;
and the opinions emitted in his " Annals of Agricul-
ture" contributed not a little to bring that discredit
on small farms, from which they have never recovered
in England.

The tours which Young made in France during
several consecutive years, had the effect of confirming
him in the views which he had adopted. French
agriculture could not support a comparison with that
of his own country. It was only a little more
advanced in the provinces where rents in kind had
given place to money rents ; and Young, attributing
its general inferiority to the small dimensions of the
farms, became more than ever a partisan of the regime
of his country.

The views of this highly influential writer are
simple, and easy to sum up.

Small farms, says he, require too much manual

11

labour, and do not yield a sufficiency of disposable
produce. The persons who occupy them are deficient
in capital and skill, so that the smallest improvements
exceed their means. They require more horses, at
the same time that they furnish only limited resources
for raising live stock. The more farms there are on
a given space, the more farm buildings and imple-
ments are needed ; that is to say, the greater are the
unproductive expenses.

Great farms, on the contrary, by distributing labour
over a large surface, do not require so many horses
or labourers, and, the local consumption subtracted,
enable the cultivators to carry to market a greater
quantity of alimentary substances for the use of the
classes engaged in other pursuits. On such farms
there is a division of labour, and each operative, being
confined to one kind of work, performs it better.
The farmers are, moreover, of a superior order, both
in point of wealth and intelligence ; and the higher
profits which they realise furnish the means of effect-
ing all needful improvements. .

These assertions, of which . the increase in the
quantity of the produce of the soil seemed to attest
the accuracy, made an impression on a number of
minds. Among the writers who endeavoured to pro-
pagate them was Herrenschwand, a physician, by
birth a Swiss, and a distinguished economist. In a
work published in London in 1786, under the title of
a " Treatise on the Principles of Population," this
writer reproduced the notions of Arthur Young ; and
his adoption of them in a work, in which the bulk of
the questions then engaging the attention of en-

12

lightened men were treated of, had the more weight,
seeing that he could be suspected neither of national
partiality nor of professional prejudice.

But if well vouched for facts seized on the popular
conviction in England, in other countries facts of
equal authenticity led to conclusions altogether op-
posite. Belgium, for example, had two zones of
arable country completely different from each other.
In the Walloon district the system of large farms
prevailed ; and, notwithstanding the natural richness
of the soil, the return from such farms was small.
The district lying betwixt Ghent and Antwerp — the
country of Wals and Termonde — was, on the contrary,
entirely covered with small farms, and there, lands
originally sterile, had become of an admirable fertility.
No where was the land let at so high a rate, was so
much live stock reared, or was there found a more
dense population in the enjoyment of so much com-
fort. At the sight of so striking a contrast it was
perfectly natural for Belgian agricultural writers to
hesitate in awarding the preference to large farms ;
indeed some of them went so far as to denounce them
as nuisances of which the country should be cleared ;
and, in 1760 (Note III.), the States of Hainault
actually passed a law for their suppression.

Nor did Italy and Spain any more furnish ad-
herents to the doctrines of Young. This was because,
in both these countries, small farms possessed a
proved superiority over all others. In Italy, whilst
the large farms of the Roman States are found to be
the receptacles of poverty and sloth, the farms of
Lombardy, not measuring more than twenty-five

13

hectares, and the metairies of Tuscany, that in
general do not exceed three or four, are the seats of
the most prosperous activity. In Spain there is
nothing that can be compared to the small possessions
of the kingdom of Valentia and Lower Catalonia, a
decisive fact that left no doubt on the part of the
natives as to which system the preference ought to
be awarded.

It was not to be expected that this problem should
be solved in a way satisfactory to all those who took
an interest in it. In such cases, it belongs to experi-
ence to clear away the doubts that hang over the
subject ; but on both sides that experience presented
conflicting results, at the same time that the reality
of each of the discordant parts was equally unques-
tionable.

Finally, a number of eclectics sprung up, who pro-
nounced great and small farms to be equally eligible,
and, reserving their blame for those of middle size,
stamped the latter with reprobation. These last, it was
said, possessed none of the advantages of the other
two ; they were too large to admit of the minute at-
tentions which give value to small locations; they
were too small to allow of the distribution and the
economy of labour that insure high profits to large
ones : neither the spade nor the plough husbandry
could be profitably practised on farms whose limited
extent would not employ a team, Nevertheless, in
several parts of Europe were to be found middle-
sized farms in a very thriving condition ; but, in the
heat of controversy, this fact was overlooked by all
parties ; and, in spite of the Essay of Shaw on Belgian

B

14

Farming, it was only in 1802 that Dr John Bell of
Edinburgh, in his work on the Scarcity, produced a
certain impression, by recalling attention to the fact,
that in Flanders there were farms from fifteen to
thirty hectares in the most thriving state, and that
there forty hectares were looked upon as too much for
one person to manage, so as to draw from the soil the
greatest possible profit. (Note IV.)

The French Revolution came to complicate the
controversy, and to render it at once more animated
and less professional. Up to that period politics had
not entered into the discussion ; but when France had
overturned the old institutions, under whose shade
the privileged classes had flourished — when, abolishing
Primogeniture, Majorats, and Entails, it had founded
a new order of things, based on civil equality, the
equal division of heritage, and the disponibility of
the soil — the question of great and small possessions
gave rise to impassioned discussions, and those who
took part in them stuck at no species of exaggera-
tion.

Nevertheless, for a long while, the mighty events
that took place in Europe absorbed so entirely the
public attention, that no extraneous subject could ob-
tain a patient hearing. Some writings appeared at
long intervals, and among the rest, the " View of
Tuscan Agriculture," by Sismondi. This author, in
describing small farms as being, on the whole, very
productive, still evinced a certain degree of reserve
in speaking of them. He admitted that small farms
yield more gross, and large ones more net produce ;
and without seeking to reconcile that assertion with

15

the superior returns which he stated the small me-
tairies of the Val de Nivole to give, compared to
those drawn by the proprietors of France and Eng-
land from lands equal in point of soil and climate,
he stopped short, after starting, to both systems, objec-
tions which he left unanswered. In France, during
the Empire, some writers continued the discussion in
the publications of agricultural societies. The prin-
ciples of the English school were then in the ascen-
dant, and the parcelling out of the soil was more than
once represented as an evil which time could not fail
to aggravate.

It was the peace of 1815, and the restoration of the
House of Bourbon, which imparted a greater energy
to the discussion ; and the new interests mixed up
with it, and advocated with the most indiscreet zeal,
soon imparted to it a false direction. All those who
regretted the past, and who looked on an aristocracy
of the soil as indispensable for the stability of the
laws and the Government, declaimed against the in-
stitutions that had been given to France ; and their
attacks were chiefly made under the pretext of up-
holding the interests of agriculture ! To believe them,
France was hastening to her ruin ; torn in pieces —
cut up in shreds by successive divisions — its soil was
becoming a heap of dust ; and everywhere were being
multiplied, with a frightful rapidity, those petty farms
whose produce was scarcely sufficient to feed those
who held them. Let a few more years run, and the
land, charged with a population that will consume all
the fruits of its labour, will no longer be able to pro-
vide nourishment for the inhabitants of the towns ; —

16

industry, science, art, all that constitute the force and
grandeur of a State, will disappear in the mass of
general misery. For such enormous evils there re-
mains only one remedy — namely, the re-organisation
of great estates, and farming on an extensive scale.

These assertions did not remain without an answer.
" If agriculture," said the friends of the principles
consecrated by the revolution of 1789, " has not yet
taken a greater start amongst us, we must lay the
blame on the long and bloody struggles which, during
twenty-five years, stripped the country of the flower of
its population. Still has it made an incontestible
progress. The towns are not depopulated ; and ma-
nufacturing industry, instead of declining, employs
more hands than at any former period. The succes-
sional divisions and partitions of the soil have not
produced the mischief ascribed to them. Far from
that being the case, it is owing to their influence that
\ France is not, like England, burdened with a mass of
\ unemployed paupers. The labouring classes have
gained in well-being and respectability ; every rood
of land that passes into their hands becomes a pledge
of security for established order ; and it is to be
wished that the time will come when every family in
possession of a little field will display in its cultivation
the inventive and fructifying activity which the love
of property is alone able to inspire." (Note V.)

It is to be remarked that almost all the English
economists declared against the rural and civil regime
established in France. All equally convinced of the
superiority of the institutions of their country, it
seemed to them that no nation could be prosperous

17

that had others entirely dissimilar. The creation of
large farms in England had proceeded simultaneously
with the extension of manufactures ; and they were
thus led to conclude, that it was to the surplus pro-
duce yielded by the former that the manufacturing
interests were indebted for their rise and expansion.
The right of primogeniture was the more prized that,
by ensuring the concentration of property, it seemed
indispensable for carrying on that description of farm-
ing the advantages of which were practically proved ;
and this opinion did not fail to influence even a great
number of persons divested of all interested pre-
judices. (Note VI.)

Thus writers, who had not been born in England,
participated in, and defended, the same views. Simond,
and Sir Francis d'lvernois, both Swiss by birth,
declared, that the breaking down of heritages was
fatal to France ; and the latter, especially, who, since
1798, had not ceased to reiterate his predictions of
impending ruin to that Power, returned to the charge
with fresh ardour. (Note VII.) Sir Francis, in
spite of his admiration of large farms, rendered
justice to small ones and their occupants, and would
have entered the lists with any one in their defence ;
what he proscribed was the conversion of large farms
into others of a middle size ; each unable to support
the expense of a plough on its own account, and
to employ the whole time of him who cultivated it.

In France the controversy was not long in finding
its way into the Legislature. As early as 1820, the
Chamber of Peers had to listen to a violent tirade
against the breaking down of properties and farms*

B 2

18

Five years later the same accusations were reproduced
in the. Chamber of Deputies by a member, the trans-
lator of a work on English agriculture, whose speech
showed him to be a follower of Arthur Young. Small
farms, he asserted, were producing the most extensive
mischief ; the towns, falling off in population, were ex-
hausting themselves in vain efforts to find in the coun-
try parts buyers for their articles ; the only industry
possible to small proprietors was, in consuming what
they grew, and in making in their families whatever
articles they required. He implored the ministers not
to confine themselves to empty regrets over the ex-
istence of evils growing out of an absurd system of
laws, which it was in their power to reform. (Note
VIII.)

The Government, besides, was not less inclined than
its advisers to reconstruct as much of the old social
edifice as the Chambers might permit. In the session
of 1 826 was presented the draught of a law designed
to place property, in certain respects at least, under
the regime of Entails and Primogeniture. Reasons of
a political kind, others founded on the interests of
agriculture, nothing that might procure votes in sup-
port of the proposed measure, was omitted ; but all
was unable to overcome the respect borne by French-
men for the great principles of equality and justice
in family divisions inscribed in the Codes. One of
the minor enactments of the proposed law alone ob-
tained a majority ; and, four years after, a new
revolution came to put an end to attempts branded
with universal reprobation.

Germany remained for a long time a stranger to

19

the discussions of which, in England and France, the
size of farms and the modes of culture were the
subjects. They were only taken up for a moment'
by the Germans, when Frederick II. distributed the
lands in his grand Bailwicks among 35,000 families,
drawn from all the neighbouring States. This mea-
sure was disapproved of by Prussian financiers, who
affirmed that the new settlers could not prosper on
their petty holdings, and that the King would thereby
lose a part of the revenues formerly drawn from the
Bailwicks. As remanked ' by Count Hertzberg
(Note IX.), it was transporting, for debate at Berlin,
the theories put forward by Arthur Young. Fre-
derick paid no attention to such strictures, and the
controversy died away of itself.

In Germany, moreover, every thing concurred to
favour the breaking down of estates into small por-
tions, which, according to Crud, a writer on agri-
culture, afforded to the major part of the population
the sweets of property, and a respectable comfortable
existence. It was in the places where tenants in per-
petuity abounded that farming was in the .most ad-
vanced state. (Note X.) Men, certain of preserv-
ing their small holdings as long as they rendered to
the proprietors the stipulated portion of the produce,
or the quit-rents, laboured with zeal. Neither the
great farmers of Westphalia, nor those of a part of
Saxony, drew so much from the soil ; and so very
thriving had their condition become, that Baron
Riesbeck, in his " Tour in Germany," declared it
preferable to that of the rich farmers of England.

The end which, at that period, the governments of

20

the north, both German and Scandinavian, had in
view, was to procure for the inhabitants of the rural
districts the advantages accruing from proprietor-
ship; and, for the attainment of that object, many
States did not hesitate to make great sacrifices.
(Note XI.) Hence arose the system of perpetual
leases, which the great Frederick applied to the lands
detached from his grand Bailwicks, in order to con-
sign them to families that cultivated them themselves ;
hence, also, came the measures by means of which
Maria Theresa and Joseph II. rendered hereditary in
the persons of the cultivators the rents due by the
peasantry to the owners, from whom they held their
lands in perpetual usufruct, and which measures they
also attempted to introduce into Hungary. In our
own times a similar policy has marked all the plans
intended for the abolition of predial servitude in
the various States where it prevailed. Betwixt the
seigneurs and their peasants — some tenanting on ac-
count of the landlords a metairie, but removable at
will, others, real slaves attached to the soil, working
under a steward or bailiff — have been effected, in sizes
and under conditions varying according to local cir-
cumstances, subdivisions of the soil. And the newly
emancipated occupants, in return for the lands ac-
quired by them in absolute property, have merely to
pay definite sums, or perform certain fixed services,
annually. In fact, this bestowal of land on the poor
cultivators has established farming on a small scale
on all the points where these grants have been made ;
but no material objection has yet been taken to such
grants ; and it is without any predilection for the

21

system which they create that the changes have
taken place, of which the progress of society every
day discloses the advantages.

At the present day a circumstance has been pointed
out in the north of Europe, which has excited some
uneasiness, namely — the breaking down and dislo-
cation of small properties held by the peasantry, and
the consequent want of uniformity in the cultivation.

It is long since complaints were heard in the other
parts of Europe of the want of discernment, which
hindered those who unduly broke down their lands
from perceiving their true interests. In Germany
several causes have made this evil to be more especi-
ally felt. Serfs and hired labourers, suddenly in-
vested with small properties, were not qualified to
make a judicious use of them. Many of them did
not understand what their new condition required of
them. The original lots were small ; — exchanges and
subdivisions had lessened their dimensions ; and as
the levying of the quit-rents became difficult on the
smaller lots, measures for protecting the interests
thus compromised became necessary.

It was only necessary to have attention attracted
by the dismemberment of small lots of land, and the
scattering of those belonging to the same owner, in
some particular instances, to cause it to be extended
to all analogous cases. Accordingly, several govern-
ments thought it advisable to issue edicts for the
purpose of facilitating the reunion of the scattered
parts of domains, and for preventing their disjunc-
tion. (Note XII.) A project of a law, proposed by
the Prussian Government for the Rhenish provinces,

indicates the views which are prevalent in Germany
on this matter. This project, which the Diet re-
jected, required that, for every species of farm, there
should be assigned a minimum extent of ground, be-
low which no parcel should in future be reduced. In
this case, it will be seen there was no question about
a system of great or small farms ; the proposed
law solely regarded a special inconvenience, for
which a remedy was sought, and which, in Germany
at the present time, merits, perhaps, more attention
than anywhere else.

Such, up to the present time, has been the order
in which the controversy relative to the dimensions
of rural possessions has proceeded. Originally tak-
ing its rise chiefly in the publications of Arthur
Young, this controversy has not yet obtained any
final solution ; for every disputant shaped his conclu-
sions according to the local circumstances presented
to him, and adopted no theory that was not sup-
ported by facts falling within his own personal ob-
servation. At the present day, truth compels us to
state that the debate remains much as it was at start-
ing. If some points have been rendered clear,
others, and especially the most important, remain in-

Ivolved in much doubt. In our opinion, this state of
the question is a proof that there has been either
some mistake in the direction of the inquiries, or an
error in the principles according to which the truth
has been sought to be elicited.

In agricultural industry, as in that of every other
description, the question may be reduced to this —
What are the modes of operation, which, after sub-

23

trading the expenses of production, will leave the
greatest surplus, or, in other words, will yield the
most considerable net profit? This is also what
parties have all along been trying to discover, but by
ways that did not lead them to the object in view,
and in not making, for the differences of situation and
social developments, the allowances which the parti-
cular state of the various countries required. On the
other hand, before pronouncing on the productive
powers of the different forms of farming, parties, in
place of confining themselves to the most simple
facts, to taking an account of the amount of rents,
or the net revenue drawn from an equal extent of
ground of the same quality, have proceeded to seek the
expression of these powers, sometimes in the relative
amount of the rural and manufacturing population,
and, at others, in the number of hands employed on
the soil ; and the question, thus overlaid with diffi-
culties which perverted its nature, only became more
obscure and insoluble.

It is this question that we are now about to resume
the consideration of in all its amplitude. For this
end, we shall inquire to what causes_thp different
sizes of farms are owing ; then into the respective

lastly, see if thej

any of them that possess over the rest such an_in(__
testibte superiority as to deserve the attention— 4*f
\en. In the~course of this examination, we
may, perhaps, have occasion to wonder at the nume-
rous mistakes fallen into by the generality of previous
inquirers, and which have hindered them from arriv-
ing at just conclusions.

24

CHAPTER II.

CAUSES OF THE DIVERSITY IN THE MODES OF CULTIVATION.

Like the greater number of facts of an economical
order, those relating to agriculture are generally very,
complicated. With natural circumstances and pecu-
liarities of climate and soil, are mixed up others of
a temporary or factitious nature, and incidents
resulting from human laws, so that it is not always
easy to discover their origin or unravel their compli-
cations.

The circumstances that influence and determine the
modes of culture in use in different localities are
numerous, and are chiefly these : the state of civilisa-
tion ; the condition of the population ; the civil laws ;
the nature of the climate ; the quality of the soil ; the
kinds of produce in request. All these causes of diver-
sity have acted, sometimes together, and at other
times successively ; and it is important to point out
how, and in what degree, their influence has been
manifested.

CHAPTER III.

INFLUENCE OF THE STATE OF THE POPULATION ON THE
SYSTEMS OF CULTIVATION.

The influence exercised by the more or less advanced
state of the population upon the forms of cultivation,
is very apparent. So long as the rural classes remain
ignorant and poor, the size of farms is fixed, for the
most part, by the quantity of labour which a single

25

family can supply. Such was the system in use among
the ancients, whether freemen laboured their own
lands themselves, or confided the task to slaves, as in
the palmy days of Athens and Rome. If there were
periods when great personages, the owners of entire
provinces, placed on them thousands of slaves, con-
demned to toil in common on large surfaces, that
system, engendered by the depopulation of Italy, and
which, according to Pliny, completed its ruin, could
not be carried on long. (Note XIII.) Whatever the
strictness of superintendence might be on the part of
masters or overseers, agriculture could not fail to
decline under the hands of labourers deprived of all
remuneration ; and in order to put a little spirit into it,
and to extract from the lands some return, it was found
necessary to again subdivide estates amongst families,
whose participation in the produce gave them an
interest in labouring them properly. Thus, under the
Empire, the old Roman husbandry was re-organised.
Cultivators, some free, others slaves by birth, occupied
a number of metairies ; but, all equally oppressed and
devoid of intelligence and capital, they only held por-
tions of ground as restricted in extent as were their
resources.

During the middle ages, the servitude of the inha-
bitants of the country parts only allowed of small
paltry farms ; and the numerous imperfections of the
metayer system, yet in use in some parts of France,
are only the remains of a regime, under which the
farmers, astricted to the soil, and deprived of all
means of acquiring wealth, were not even the owners
of the few instruments of labour which they had occa-

26

sion for. In the north of Europe, the mode of farm-
ing underwent several changes. The nobles alone
had the right of holding land in property ; and the
peasantry, with whom they shared the produce, worked
under their orders. At a later period, the peasants
obtained allotments, large enough for their subsis-
tence : in place of having nothing to receive from their
masters, they had to render fixed annual services, but
leaving them two or three days in the week to them-
selves. This practice, which yet subsists in Hungary
and in the Russian empire, has disappeared in the
other States of the north. According as wealth and
trade made their way in the country, proprietors found
it advantageous to convert into yearly rents, payable
in money or produce, the stipulated quotas of days'
labour. Large portions of the seignorial domains
were thus conceded ; and on every side were multi-
plied those small possessions each of which was
sufficient to occupy a single family. (Note XIV.)

In order to give diversity to the modes of cultiva-
tion, it was necessary that wealth and freedom should
be diffused in the country districts. This was what
was seen to happen in those countries of Europe where
civilisation made the most rapid progress. The ancient
serfs, villains, or tenants-at-will, freed from their de-
pressing bondage, acquired some little wealth ; by
degrees capital accumulated in their hands, and the
time arrived when they possessed enough to charge
themselves with farms on their own account and
risk. (Note XV.) From that time dates the change
that took place in the sizes of farms and modes of
culture. By the side of those who had become rich,

27

were others who had failed in their undertakings ; the
former naturally sought to proportion their operations
to the extent of their resources ; and, in places where
circumstances favoured them, they added to the size
of their possessions.

The emancipation of the rural classes did not less
contribute to reduce the size of farms in some dis-
tricts than it did to enlarge them in others. In the
vicinity of towns — in places where the industrious and
thriving classes were established — poor cultivators
betook themselves chiefly to the rearing of those de-
licate products which required much manual labour. In
their little fields, besides corn, they raised vegetables,
fruits, and flax, for which they found a ready sale at
such prices as insured to them a prosperous existence.
The mere farmers retreated before these competitors,
and the old farms in such localities were gradually
broken down and parcelled out.

Thus, under the increasing influence of wealth and
comfort, were formed, in the most thriving countries,
several classes of cultivators, and several modes of
farming. With less inequality in the condition of the
rural families, the more various became the forms and
modes of farming.

In general, the rural economy of a country is only
changed slowly and by degrees. Every existing
system resists innovations by the efforts made by the
present occupants to retain their farms, and still more
by the loss and expense which the adaptation of the
farm-buildings to the new modes of management
would occasion. Still are there several instances to
prove with what rapidity such changes may be effected,

28

when peculiar circumstances come to favour exclusively
certain classes of cultivators, and to insure to them
special advantages.

England has twice witnessed such changes. Under
Henry VIIL, the tenants of sheep-farms obtained high
profits, and dispossessed the others. In the course of
a few years, numerous unions of farms took place in
several counties ; and multitudes, evicted from their
possessions by the new comers, had, for the most part,
no other resource than to become vagabonds or men-
dicants. In the last century, the same occurrence
took place to a much greater extent. Owing to the
extraordinary prosperity of manufactures, a consider-
able number of farmers, settled in districts the best
adapted for supplying the new demands of consump-
tion, speedily acquired the means of extending their
farming enterprises. Those who had not been so favour-
ably situated sank under the competition, and thus
England came to be covered with large farms. In
this rapid innovation everything was evidently owing
to the change that had taken place in the agricultural
body. Considerable capitals becoming concentrated
in the hands of only a part of the farmers, enabled
them to effect the improvements that insured them a
preference. If agricultural profits had been less un-
equally divided, the old tenants would not have been
exposed to the competition that bore them down ; and
it is probable that farming, encouraged by the gene-
rally prosperous condition of the country, would have
developed itself, and been improved, under the then
existing forms of cultivation.

That such would have been the case is proved by

29

what took place in other countries. In Flanders and
Italy especially, it was generally to the advantage of
the petty cultivator that the progress made in the arts
and wealth redounded. Benefitted by the increasing
demand for the sort of produce which it alone was
able to raise with advantage, this class of cultivators
prospered more than any other, and gradually spread
itself over the soil. In Flanders, especially, such was
the rise of rent which it offered for the land, that the
great farmers shrank from the competition ; and in
a short time, in nearly the whole of the districts which
provision Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and all the other
towns that gave so much eclat to the middle ages,
very small possessions were only to be seen.

It is the poverty of the farmers which, in several
parts of France, yet keeps up, by means of the
metayer system, farms as small in surface as they are
in produce. In all the departments of the centre
and the west, where the greater part of the cultivators
are too poor to become the owners of the stock on
their metairies, none of them have capital enough to
farm with advantage large tracts of ground. Every-
thing even combines to prove that many of them hold
more land than they can turn to good account, and
that they would be gainers by confining the slender
means of production at their command within more
restricted limits. Sooner or later the spirit of activity
and enterprise will make its way into these provinces,
now so much behind, and then new modes of farming
will come to displace the present, whose uniformity
has no other cause than the general destitution of
means among those who practise them.

c 2

30

No country, at present, offers a more striking
example of what the condition of the rural classes
may become, under certain systems of farming, than
the north of Germany. In those provinces, where
the ancient serfs have been recently admitted to the
enjoyments of property — in Pomerania and Mecklen-
burg, in Eastern and Western Prussia — there are
everywhere found, contiguous to each other, two
modes of farming altogether different. On the one
hand are the small lots of land supporting the peasants
scarcely able to pay the small yearly charges or quit-
rents imposed by the grants made in their favour ;
on the other, hundreds and even thousands of hectares
belonging to the nobility, and cultivated in the lump
for want of farmers able to take them in portions.
On these immense domains the whole operations are
carried on exclusively for behoof of the owners ; and,
from the labourers up to the stewards, all those who
take a part in the cultivation receive yearly or daily
wages. (Note XVI.)

These facts clearly demonstrate how strict are the
bonds which attach the forms of rural industry to
the condition and the distribution of wealth in the
ranks of the population that exercise it. Whatever
may be the nature of the climate or soil, every
system only develops itself under certain conditions
of accumulation and of distribution of the agricul-
tural savings. Thus, we see no large farms so long
as capital is at once scanty and much disseminated.
In like manner we find no small thriving farms along-
side of cultivators too rich to be satisfied with the
small profits to be drawn from them ; and only find

31

labourers too poor to purchase the smallest stocking.
In all the States where the country people have been
made free, the existing systems were not founded
without struggles betwixt the farmers of different
orders. Those of them who surpassed the rest owed
their success solely to the higher profits attached to
their peculiar modes of operation ; it was this which
enabled them to lease the lands at rents which drove
their competitors from the field. In these compe-
titions, sometimes large farms had the mastery, and at
other times middling or small ones. Numerous
causes have produced these contrary results, and we
shall now proceed to point out the principal ones.

CHAPTER IV.

INFLUENCE OF THE KINDS OF PRODUCE AND CONSUMPTION
ON THE SYSTEMS OF CULTIVATION.

The produce which the earth is called on to yield
is as various as are the wants which it is destined to
satisfy. If a community requires bread and butcher
meat, it also stands in need of flax, oil, wine, spirits,
fruit, vegetables, in short, of a multitude of articles
whose number becomes greater in proportion as
wealth increases and diffuses itself.

But all these products do not admit of the same
modes of labour being applied to the rearing of them.
While some come up at little cost, others require a
great deal of tending and manual labour, and hence
arise the numerous differences in the forms and or-
ganisation of farms.

32

Thus the rearing of cattle and sheep, which
only require the superintendence of the master and
the aid of a few servants, may extend over large
tracts of country ; whilst gardening, and that sort of
culture which most approximates to it, demand too
much care and labour to be carried on except on very
moderate bounds.

Different kinds of products cannot all be raised
isolated from the rest, nor become the objects of
separate and distinct industries. All cultivators are
obliged to procure manure, without which the pro-
ductive powers of the earth would be exhausted. They
are equally under the necessity of preserving these
powers by varying the rotation of the crops ; and
there is no farm that does not combine on it various
kinds of them. On corn farms, a part of the land is
set aside for rearing bestial, and the growing of fodder,
while a certain extent of corn is found on pastoral
farms. The smallest cultivators include in their rota-
tions the corn required for their own consumption ; the
owners of vineyards, even, do not confine themselves to
dressing the vine shoots, which only require attention
during a part of the year ; and there is no doubt that,
without the masses of manure supplied by Paris, the
kitchen gardeners in its vicinity would either be
obliged to renounce their calling, or to join to it
the raising of food for the animals which would then
become indispensable for producing the necessary
manure.

Still the products are not mixed with, and do not
succeed each other in the same proportions, and it is
the wants of the consumer which, in regulating this

33

matter, give to farms their prevailing characters and
forms. If the soil is at once called on, as in most
of the countries of the south, to produce grain, vege-
tables, wine, oil, and even silk worms, possessions are
necessarily of a very small size. Tenants, who are at
one and the same time gardeners and vinedressers,
would not choose to take on hand a great space of
ground, seeing that certain of their operations are of
too nice a nature to be entrusted to day labourers. It
is because the half of the land is devoted to flax,
hemp, hops, colza, pot-herbs, and dye stuffs, that the
farms in so many parts of Flanders, Belgium, Ger-
many, and Switzerland, are of such limited size. The
more place such kinds of products find in the rotations,
the more restricted is the size of the farms. Those in
the districts of Vaes and Termonde, do not, on an
average, exceed 8 hectares ; and such an extent would
certainly appear great to the majority of cultivators
in the environs of towns, whose crops, fetching a high
price, are only brought to maturity by dint of much
care and manual labour.

On the contrary, if the agricultural operations re-
quire few labourers, every thing favours the formation
of large farms, which end by displacing all others. In
England, where the farms have only to raise bestial
and grain, they have become immense. If the popu-
lation had required a greater variety of the means of
subsistence — if it had been necessary to rear a greater
number of articles, the cultivation of which requires
much tending and manual labour — the present system
would not have taken such an extension, and England
would yet reckon a multitude of small farms.

34

It is natural for cultivators, constrained to live within
the limits assigned to their undertakings, to apply
themselves to those branches of production the most
adapted to fill up the leisure time which the smallness
of their holdings leaves them. Still is it necessary,
in order that their industry may be diversified, to
consult the wants of the locality, and the tastes there
manifested. In all cases, one thing is clear, that the
nature of the produce and that of the consumption act
alternately as cause and effect. Articles much in re-
quest soon become abundant : the more of them are
grown, the more the art of rearing them becomes ge-
nerally known. The reverse holds as to those articles
which are little in demand : they remain dearer and
more rare in proportion as skill is wanting to those
who cultivate them. England at present offers an
example which fully confirms these assertions. Vege-
tables, poultry, dairy and garden produce, which its
large farms do riot furnish in sufficient abundance, are
in part imported from France to meet the demands of
the classes rich enough to give a high price for them.

Moreover, everything combines to consolidate and
maintain agricultural systems as soon as they have
come to be preferred. If it be small possessions
which the nature of the produce has caused to prevail,
those who occupy them do not realise profits great
enough for amassing the capitals required for the or-
ganisation of large farms. If large farms are general,
then the rural population, being solely made up of
rich masters and hired labourers, does not furnish
cultivators, who have at once the inclination and the
pecuniary means to establish themselves on small
possessions.

35

It is, nevertheless, to be remarked that the progress
of society, by diversifying and refining the wants of
men, tends more to multiply small than large farms.
Communities, as they become rich, seek, with greater
eagerness, after those nice and delicate articles of
food, whose difficult and costly production they are
able to pay for. This fact is apparent in the vicinity
of the towns where a great number of wealthy
families reside ; grain and pasture farms withdraw to
a distance, and in their stead come, first, gardens,
then, beyond the narrow circle which they take in, a
number of crops in which corn and a mixture of
crops only hold a secondary place. In proportion as
these centres of population increase in size, and as
the progress of industry and wealth create new ones,
a similar change takes place in the destination of the
other portions of the territory ; and there is no doabt
that this change will become more and more exten-
sive in the future.

CHAPTER V.

INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE ON THE SIZE OF FARMS.

The influence of climate on the systems of rural
organisation is very considerable. This influence is
universally apparent, and everywhere contributes to
determine the size of farms.

The reason of this is sufficiently obvious. Neither
the crops which the earth yields nor the labour which
it requires are the same under all temperatures. To
each latitude belong productions which are peculiar

36

to it ; in all countries the water that falls from the
sky is not alike sufficient for supporting vegetation ;
and hence arise the disparities and contrasts that are
exhibited in the size of farms and processes of culti-
vation.

If we only turn our eyes to Europe, the effects
resulting from the difference of climate are there
distinctly manifest. If there be productions common
to almost all the countries of which it is composed,
there are also some which nature has reserved for
particular zones ; and the farther we advance towards
the south, the greater variety there is in the vegetable
productions which cultivation embraces.

Thus, while the countries of the north are wholly
occupied with the rearing of corn, flax, and garden
stuffs, the vine already begins to show itself in several
parts of Germany. Farther onwards, in the south of
France, appear the olive, maize, millet, the fig, and
the mulberry. Besides these, Italy produces rice,
saffron, the water melon, and the lemon. And in the
richest soils of Spain and Portugal, in the valley of
Minho, and the fertile , plains of Beira, near to the
productions common to the other countries of Europe,
flourish the aloe, the pepper-plant, the pistachio, in
some places even the sugar-cane, the cotton-plant,
and certain tropical vegetables, acclimated by dint of
care and perseverance.

It is the extreme variety in the processes of labour,
of which they are the theatre, that gives to the best
possessions of the south their distinctive character.
In all countries it is desirable to assemble upon the
same farms the greatest possible variety of plants ;

37

the more of them are found on each farm, the more
does their rotation spare the natural forces of the soil,
and lessen the duration of the fallows. But in the
north, where there are only found hardy productions
of easy growth, the simplicity of the processes applied
to them do not oblige the cultivators to confine their
labours within narrow limits. It is quite otherwise
in the south. There the productions are infinitely
more numerous ; and, of those that grow on the same
field, there are always some much too precious not to
require constantly the eye and the hand of the master.
Thus, the size of the farms diminishes in proportion
as these last-mentioned productions occupy more
space on the soil. The farms of Lombardy often
extend to twenty hectares, which is three or four
times more than the superficial contents of the
metairies of Sienna, Lucca, and Bergamraa ; and the
bounds of the latter would even appear excessive to
the peasants of the plain of Valentia, who look upon
one or two hectares, having the means of irrigation, as
sufficient to occupy and maintain a family.

Another cause concurs to keep farms in the coun-
tries of the south within very narrow limits, and that
is the necessity of supplying moisture to the soil ex-
posed to the rays of a scorching sun. The greater
part of the crops would perish if water were not ap-
plied to revive vegetation ; and to the various labours
of irrigation, which are indispensable for a part of
the crops, are joined others also too considerable to
permit a single cultivator to employ them on a large
surface.

Nevertheless, it does not hold that in the south of
Europe there are only small farms to be met with ;

38

far from this being the case, there are some of great
extent, but these are only the result of circumstances,
which prevent a better use being made of the lands
on which they are found. " Warm and dry soils are
suitable for large farms, and those of a moist and
humid nature for small ones," says the Spanish writer
Colmeiro ; and, in his country, such is the distinction
made betwixt these two descriptions of land — betwixt
those that, only receiving water from the clouds, are
uncertain in their produce, and others, which, having
the advantage of irrigation, are adapted to all sorts
of crops, and yield a large and certain return. Whilst
the last mentioned lands bear crops of immense value,
and support a dense population, the others either pro-
duce corn crops whose yield is doubtful, or, left in a
state of nature, furnish a meagre and scanty pastur-
age.

There is still another characteristic of countries
with a high temperature, and that is, the unequal
fertility of different sections of their territory. In
the north, cultivation is, for the most part, extended
everywhere ; and the high lying plains are equally
susceptible of it as the most moist valleys. In the
south, on the contrary, the irrigated portions of the
soil are alone capable of being profitably laboured,
and the rest of the land either produces little, or con-
sists of downs and heaths parched by the drought.
If Italy be at once so perfectly cultivated and so po-
pulous, it is because there is no country where water
is so abundant and so equally distributed. From the
chains of mountains, which intersect it in its whole
length, descend a multitude of brooks and rivers,
which bathe it in every direction, and even form in

39

some places unhealthy marshes. The Spanish penin-
sula has not the same advantage ; and there vast
plains are almost worthless for the support of its po-
pulation; but, at sametime, no where in the north
does the earth, on an equal space, give forth as much
produce as in those parts of the south which com-
bine the double advantage of heat and moisture. On
these, vegetation is of an incomparable vigour — the
crops succeed each other almost without interrup-
tion ; and the small farms that raise them, after
covering all advances, yield a surplus value,
whose amount is without a parallel elsewhere.
This is shown by the enormous rents, whether in
kind or in money, which the proprietors of such farms
receive. In spite of the humble condition, and even
in some places of the habitual misery, of the peasantry
who pay them, these rents vastly exceed the highest
that are drawn in the best farmed counties of England.
These observations, and the facts by which they
are supported, show how impossible it is for the size
of farms not to undergo the influence of climates and
temperatures. In fact, it is the nature of the different
products destined for consumption which impress on
labour its conditions and modes of application. In
the south — where, among the crops whose diversity
assures to the soil all the fertility of which it is
capable, are some that require minute and careful
attentions — the farms, even in places where no means
of cultivation are awanting, are small, and the best of
them descend to dimensions which, under colder
latitudes, would leave the cultivators almost without
work.

40

CHAPTER VI.

INFLUENCE OF THE NATURE OF THE SOIL ON THE MODES OF
CULTIVATION.

The explanations given above, on the subject of
the influence of climate, show how certain pecu-
liarities of the soil may determine the use made of it.
Thus, in the southern countries, the different modes
of management are the results of the degrees of
humidity in the soil ; small farms prosper in those
localities where the presence of water favours their
cultivation ; large farms are only found on those por-
tions of the territory exposed to droughts ; and some-
times on these a grain crop is hazarded ; at others,
they are found in a state of arid downs or heaths, of
which a large surface is required for the pasture of a
few bestial. In Spain and Portugal there are almost
entire provinces where the soil rejects any regular
and systematic course of farming. In the latter
country, amongst others, three-fourths of Alemtegio,
Algarva, and Estremadura, are in a wild state, and
let to great farmers, whose flocks, turned loose on
them, pick up a scanty nourishment.

Other accidents, connected with the nature of the
territor}', have also their influence. In Italy, for
example, in most places where the malaria has driven
away the inhabitants, large farms prevail. It is to
such farms, which often extend to 7,000 or 8,000
hectares, that are sent twice a-year troops of day-
labourers who, as soon as their work is done, hasten
to fly from localities whose insalubrity is frightful.

41

Everywhere, also, circumstances less exceptional
than the above have an effect on the division of pos-
sessions. Mountainous and flat countries are not
under the same management — pastoral districts have
usually more large farms than others. All this is so
clear, natural, and evident, as not to require elucida-
tion.

But the point to which it is important to direct
attention, is the influence on the size of farms exer-
cised by the nature of the arable beds of the soil.
Hitherto, that influence has not been sufficiently
marked ; and it is the more essential to keep it in
view, inasmuch as the continued progress of comfort
and industry cannot fail to increase it.

In ancient Europe, the rude and scanty populations
left a great part of their lands uncultivated. The
only portions which they reclaimed were those deemed
the most adapted for corn ; they sowed the best land
with wheat, and grew rye or barley on the inferior
soils, allowing them to rest after having taken a single
crop. Under this regime, yet followed in countries
the least forward, the respective qualities of the dif-
ferent portions of the soil were held as of small
importance. Poor and ignorant, the rural class was
entirely composed of small tenants not in a condition
to stretch their advances or labours over large sur-
faces ; so that the size of farms continued to be deter-
mined by the paucity of the means of production at
the command of those who occupied them.

At the present day, things are quite changed in the
most advanced countries. There, the populations,
industrious and rich, require a number of productions

D 2

formerly unknown, or too difficult to obtain ; and the
qualities of the soil contribute to determine the choice
of the systems of farming. Nothing is so easy as to
explain this. There are different kinds of land, strong
and light, hard and open, of unequal depths, with sub-
soils more or less porous. Some, by allowing the
roots of all sorts of plants to penetrate, bring them all
to maturity ; others are only suited to certain kinds ;
and, from the impossibility of raising on them the same
crops, comes that of subjecting them all to the same
uniform mode of management.

There are many soils, for example, which are neither
suitable for farms of a small or middle size. These
farms only thrive by raising delicate and high-priced
articles alongst with ctorn ; they require a soil which
can grow every variety of plants, and which can be
easily adapted to the rearing of those that are most
costly. The latter are not suited to tenacious soils,
which prevent their long and spiral roots from pene-
trating deep into the earth.

All kinds of land, on the contrary, where corn crops
succeed, are suitable for large farms. On these are
raised no vegetables that require much manual labour ;
all the crops consist of grains, corn, and fodder ; and
the soils even, that only carry artificial grasses, often
renewed, are by no means unsuitable for such farms.
If they are heavy, cold, and soaked with wet during
the bad season, they require more ploughs ; and the
increased number of horses that then becomes neces-
sary, does not prevent being extended over large sur-
faces those labours which their simplicity renders easy
to direct.

V UNIVERSITY }

^y^o^i

Thus it is, that, as often as no obstacle intervenes
to derange the natural course of things, the qualities
of the soil are found to be decisive of the size of pos-
sessions. Large farms require districts where grain
crops and a few vegetables of a hardy nature come best
to maturity ; and small farms demand those parts of
the territory where all sorts of crops may be grown.
So in England even, where so many causes co-operate
in favour of large farms, there are still a considerable
number of small ones ; and it is upon soils of a
silicious or sharp nature that they have maintained
their ground. According to Mr Porter (" Progress
of the Nation," vol. I. page 180) there are in England
94,883 farmers, who labour their possessions without
any other assistance than that of their families. By
adding to these an unknown number who employ only
one or two servants, it will be found that there exist
in England a much greater number of middle or small-
sized farms than is generally supposed. In France, it
is where the vegetable mould is of a clayey nature, as
in Brie, Beauce, and Vexin, that large farms abound ;
while in French Flanders the light and open soils have
there given rise to small and middle-sized farms. No
country surpasses Belgium in an agricultural point of
view, and none shows better than it how far the
influence of the distinctive qualities of the soil extends.
Each sort of soil there gives rise to a different species
of management. In the Walloon country, in the
environs of Jauche, Jodoigne, and Nivelles, the heavy
and strong lands are let out in very large farms ; in
Brabant, the lighter and more friable soils have given
rise to farms of a middle order ; and on the light sandy

44

plains of St. Nicolas and Termonde, only very small
farms are to be seen. Besides, such facts are every-
where else apparent ; for it is rarely observed that the
striking contrasts which the same cantons or even
parishes present, are traceable to any other cause than
the varieties of the soil in the different portions of the
territory.

It is, moreover, important to remark, that the pro-
gress made in agricultural knowledge may produce
various modifications in the use made of, and in the
productive capacity of, different kinds of land. Thus,
in the greater part of the countries where agriculture
has taken a considerable start, lands which for centuries
had been considered too worthless to be laboured at all,
are now regarded as rich and fertile ; and such, amongst
others, are those of a sandy or gravelly nature.

For a long time these lands, less suited, when the art
of farming was in a backward state, for rearing corn
crops than those of a clayey soil, were in very low
repute, of which traces are still to be found in the
language and opinions of a great number of cultiva-
tors. To raise them in estimation, it was necessary
that the mode of improving them should be known,
and that the delicate and nice articles reared on them
should come to be more in demand. At the present
day, lands of that sort are being more and more appre-
ciated ; and the preference is already accorded to them
in more countries than Belgium. In England, for
example, this has begun to be the case ; and it is a
well-attested fact, that in several counties where lands
considered as good are let at the rate of 22s. to 25s.
per acre, others, formerly set down as lean and poor,

45

are now let from 80s. to 35s. (Note XVII.) The
same fact is met with elsewhere ; and in France
there are a great many districts where the rise in
rent has been such on lands, other than those rated in
the Cadastre as of the first class, that already some of
the former surpass the latter in the net yearly returns.
(Note XVIII.) .

It is the improved skill in the art of cultivation that
has redeemed from their original inferiority lands
which, in order to display all their productive power,
merely required the application of more judicious
modes of management. This change has naturally
increased the number of farms of a middle or small
size ; for the advantage accrues to them as often as
portions of the ground, whose amelioration requires
much labour, and which only make up for that draw-
back by the quality of their produce, are added to the
arable part of the territory. Other sorts of improve-
ments may have a contrary result ; and England offers
a proof of this. Thus, the skilful application made of
the steam-engine to the draining of land has been
favourable to large farms. Costly undertakings like
those which have converted into rich domains the
worst districts of Lincoln and Cambridge shires, could
only be executed on vast surfaces. To ensure their
success, each mechanical construction behoved to be-
come the centre of a considerate range of country
subject to the same direction : every other arrange-
ment would have encountered, in the difficulty of
conciliating the interests and exigencies of the diffe-
rent cultivators, an obstacle which would probably

46

have diminished, in an undue degree, the profits of the
operation.

Moreover, whatever may be the progress of human
industry, the qualities of the soil, by determining its
fitness for such and such kinds of produce, will have
more and more influence on the size of farms. Large
farms will continue to embrace lands where flocks
find an abundant pasturage, as well as those which
are not congenial either to roots or other crops that
require much pains and weeding ; while middle and
small-sized farms, which only succeed where to corn
crops can be joined others whose growth requires
much care and manual labour, will be preferred on
easy and deep soils. Thus are there fundamental
causes which are operative in all periods, and whose
influence will go on augmenting with the progress of
wealth and population. '•- .

CHAPTER VII.

INFLUENCE OF THE CIVIL LAWS ON THE SIZE OF FARMS.

Of all the causes which contribute to occasion dif-
ferences in the size of farms, the most effective are
believed to reside in the distribution of wealth and
property. Many writers have attributed to this cause
a decisive influence i and some have looked on the
established systems of agriculture in different countries
as the necessary results of the laws which regulate
heritable successions and the circulation of landed pro-
perty. Nevertheless, nothing is less correct than this

47

opinion ; and whoever looks attentively at facts will
not be long in admitting how rarely it happens that
the size of estates determines that of farms.

It is, first of all, clear that great estates do not
necessarily give rise to great farms. In ancient
Europe, the seignorial domains, and the lands of the
clergy, were of immense extent ; and still were they
let out to poor tenants occupying portions of a mid-
dling or small size. The same contrasts exist in our
own times. If England contains large farms, Ireland,
where the civil laws equally concentrate landed
property, presents almost everywhere cottages with
scarcely two or three hectares of ground attached to
them. It is the same in Italy and Spain, where the
most extensive and valuable estates generally show a
multitude of small tenants. The like holds in certain
parts of Germany, where indivisible entailed baronies
often comprehend 50 or 60 small farms let to as many
peasant families.

Moreover, it is not needful to go out of France for
a proof of there being no necessary connexion betwixt
the dimensions of estates and those of farms. What
in our country distinguishes the greatest domains
from others, is their being composed of a greater
number of contiguous farms ; but of farms which, let
out to different tenants, have each only the quantity
of land usually let to one person.in the districts where
they lie. That is true of the departments of the centre
and the west, where the metairies and farms on great
estates are not different, in any respect, from those
found in their vicinity. The like is also true of the
rich departments of the north, where the proprietors

48

know their own interest better than to unite, in a
single farm, possessions whose high rents attest their
perfect adaptation to the exigencies of the local con-
sumption. In a word, the same thing holds good
throughout ; because, in every locality, the extent of
farms depends on causes entirely distinct from the
amount of the fortunes of those who are the proprietors
of them.

Farms are essentially manufactories of certain
articles ; and, like other industrial establishments,
assume and preserve those forms and modes of opera-
tion which, according to their localities, produce the
most profit on the capital expended on them. Among
whatever number of persons lands may be divided,
nothing can prevail over the necessity of adapting
them to the local exigencies ; and any proprietor
who, from whatever motive it may be, would seek to
give to his farms the dimensions unsuited to the sys-
tem of cultivation, of which local experience attests
the superiority, would be punished for it by a decline
in his rent-roll.

But if great estates are not sufficient to create
great farms, have not a freedom of sale and an equal
division in successions the effect of diminishing the
size of farms ? The belief in this being the case is
very general ; and, as it seems to be justified by the
increase of middle and small-sized farms in France,
it is important to enter into some relative explana-
tions.

And let us, first of all, clear away a prejudice devoid
of all foundation. Neither the equality of rights in
heritable successions, nor the free access given to all

49

to the advantages of property, conduct, as so many
persons have imagined, to the levelling of conditions
and fortunes. If tnis regime communicates more
mobility to fortunes, it still leaves room for the
formation of all the diversities "of condition, without
which society would cease to be progressive. It is now
upwards of half a century since the destinies of France
were confided to it ; and the working classes have not
ceased to increase in numbers, while the higher classes,
far from being impoverished, have gained in opulence,
and contain among them a greater number of large
fortunes than at any former period. What is more,
in spite of the subdivisions which the soil has undergone,
the number of proprietors has not even augmented
with the same rapidity as the total population ; for,
whilst the latter has advanced at the rate of 14 per
cent, in twenty years, it is only at the rate of 8 per
cent, that, within the same period, the increase in the
number of proprietors has taken place. These facts,
easy to verify (and all other countries where the
privileges of real property have been abolished pre-
sent the like), prove how powerful are. the laws which,
in all ages and under the most different institutions,
have implanted the principle of Inequality in the
bosom of societies, and hovr mistaken are those who
apprehend that France will one day resemble a draught-
board, where each family, reduced to its small square
or patch of land, will be compelled, in order to subsist, •
to labour it with their own hands.

The effect of the laws which in France have freed
property from the shackles of primogeniture and
entails, has been, not the gradual breaking down of

50

private fortunes, but the dispersal of the estates of
which they were made up. Two causes have more
especially concurred to break down more estates than
to recompose others ; the one is the divisions effected
amongst heirs of domains formerly belonging to one per-
son ; the other, and the most powerful, consists in the
advantage which has hitherto attached to the sales of
estates in separate portions. Small capitals being the
most numerous, are attracted towards all the invest-
ments that suit them ; and the smaller the lots are
which are offered for sale, the greater is the number of
competitors who come forward to raise the price.
Hence, it is usual to break down, for sale, into several
lots, properties, each of which formed one whole;
and this accounts for those subdivisions which, in
several departments, have been going on with so much
rapidity.

But whatever advantage may accrue to sellers by
the breaking down of their properties, it would be a
mistake to imagine that these sales in detail necessarily
change or modify the established systems of farming.
The soil and the management of it are but rarely
united in the same hands ; both have their distinctive
causes of organisation, and, far from following pro-
perty in its mutations, it is, on the contrary, the
exigencies of farming that give to these mutations
their rules and limits.

• In fact, every proprietor, who disposes of his pro-
perty, has only one object in view, namely, to obtain
for it the largest sum possible. Thus, as soon as a
piece of land or an estate cannot be divided without
losing a part of its leaseable value, he refrains from

51

dismembering it. To act otherwise would be to
renounce the assured benefit which the sale of it in.
one piece would produce ; and would be as if one
were to pull down a house in the hope of selling the
materials at a higher price than the building itself.
Such acts are too insensate to be apprehended ; and
it may be laid down that no one disposes of or sub-
divides his lands until after he has consulted the
necessities of that farming industry which is to pay
for the use of them.

However keen and active the competition of small
capitals seeking an investment may be, it can never
take place to the entire disregard of interests ever
present and easy to perceive. The smallest capital-
ists seek to draw a good proit from their funds ; and
if too small lots are offered, which would diminish
their capital, they will wait until their savings enable
them to buy greater. If they prefer land as an in-
vestment, it is because they know that the property
bought will find tenants disposed to take it at the
usual rate of rent. This is what really ensues. The
changes, the transformations, which landed property
undergoes, leave intact and undisturbed the capital
engaged in farming. This capital is neither aug-
mented nor diminished, because the land has got new
masters ; neither the forms under which it exists,
nor those that have regulated its distribution, are at
all altered ; and those who occupy it preserve at once
the means and the desire of continuing the exercise
of the industry by which they utilise it. Thus, be-
fore as after the sales in detail, the farmers of the
district offer for the lands an amount of rent proper-

52

tionate to the profit which they hope to realise ; and
as the new proprietors, if they have not bought them
with a view to cultivate them in person, have an in-
terest in letting them to these farmers, the lands fall,
or remain under the system of farming which, in
best remunerating those who follow it, permits them
to offer the highest rent. In this respect the compe-
tition that takes place amongst the cultivators living in
the same locality affords all the desirable guarantees
for obtaining a fair rent. These producers, small or
great, desire nothing so much as to give to the esta-
blishments which they direct the dimensions and
forms the most favourable to the nature of their
operations. All of them seek to obtain the parcels
suited to them. The most expert beat their com-
petitors by offering more ; and the whole difference,
which the degree of dispersion of the property creates,
is to attach to different farming establishments a
greater or less number of fields belonging to several
proprietors.

Nothing in the movements and subdivisions of
property can prevent the land from falling into the
hands of farmers who know how to make the most
of it ; and among the most capable, the mode of
farming to which they owe their superiority naturally
triumphs. If the case were otherwise — if the break-
ing down of the soil substituted, for the industrial
systems which the exigencies of the local production
demanded, others founded on different bases — rents,
instead of rising, as they have done in France for the
last half century, would have fallen, or remained sta-
tionary. In their rapid rise is found the strongest

53

proof of no obstacle having arisen to impede, weaken,
or alter the progressive development of agricultural
science and wealth.

It is, besides, well known that the sizes of proper-
ties in France have changed oftener than those of
farms. Over the whole country sales in detail, and
successional divisions, have increased the dispersion
or breaking down of property ; and still, in the
greater part of the provinces, there are yet found
modes of farming more ancient than the laws of
succession which regulate us. Thus have the me-
tairies and farms of most of the districts of the west
and centre retained their ancient dimensions ; so also
the middle-sized farms of French Flanders, and of a
part of the countries of the north and south, have
only, on a few points, lost in extent. The like is
true as to the large farms that supply Paris with
* corn, which have not been superseded by more
contracted centres of production. This is not,
however, because many of these farms have not been
sold in portions. In Beauce the partitions have been
less frequent ; they have not been less so in the Vexin
of Normandy, where detached lots of land have
always existed ; but the proprietory changes that
have taken place have not broken up the established
regime as to farms, which have preserved their
pristine dimensions and even increased them. The
wealthy farmers of the country rent the lands coming
from the dismembered farms, annex them to others
whose extension is advantageous ; and all the diffe-
rence lies in their paying their rents to several pro-
prietors.

E 2

54

Still is it"clear that middle or small-sized farms are
those which have acquired, and continue to preserve,
most favour. Is this effect to be ascribed to our law
of equal division in heritages, and the splitting up
of property ? We believe that such an effect ensues,
in the special case, where the soil happens to belong
to parties who cultivate it themselves ; and that, in
all other cases, the change has arisen from purely
agricultural causes — from causes whose activity
would be the same under all systems that do not
unduly cramp the progress of society.

During the last thirty years, France has made the
most rapid and admirable progress. On all the
points of her territory the ^population has increased,
the towns are enlarged, and industry and comfort
have become more universally diffused. How has
all this come about ? It is because new wants, by
calling for new agricultural operations, came to
modify their direction and forms. Not only was it
needful to multiply the garden produce in order to
satisfy the increasing wants of consumption — the
produce destined for industrial purposes found an
enlarged and better market. This is what has given
so much encouragement to small farms. The more
green crops there are — the more vegetables, whose
delicate nature and high price demand much care and
manual labour, find a place by the side of the ancient
crops — the more encouragement is given to small
farms, and the richer do their tenants become ; so
that it may be truly said that such farms have pro-
gressed in the same ratio as wealth and the manufac-
turing arts.

55

Another cause has not a little conduced to increase
the number of small farms, and that is their having
taken possession of the greater part of the poor arid
soils, which had remained uncultivated for ages.
Large farms could not compete with small, on lands
whose difficult in-bringing required the combination
of a variety of operations on the same spots. That
description of land has fallen to small farmers, because
it was only they who could extract from it products
sufficiently high-priced to pay the cost of bringing it
under cultivation ; and hence another cause of the
spread of small possessions.

We now come to that single mode of farming which
is liable to be affected, in its forms, by a complete
freedom of alienation, and a law of equal division in
successions. We allude to farming practised by the
proprietors themselves. If it happens that lands let
out naturally find their way into the hands of culti-
vators whose system of labour is the most lucrative,
it may also happen that proprietors do not reform
the vices of their modes of labour, and, instead of
adopting better, even allow those which they follow
to deteriorate. Already have frequent complaints
been heard on this head ; examples have been cited
of fields too much subdivided to permit their being
cultivated in a profitable manner ; of cultivators per-
sisting in confining their labours to pieces of land
lying too detached, or to inheritances too much re-
duced in size to employ their time ; and thus leaving
them exposed to an indigence from which it would be
so easy to escape. This evil exists in certain places ;
but is it really one of much gravity ? We do not

56

think so, inasmuch as its causes are of a temporary
nature, and even were it to endure or become greater,
the time will come when it will cure itself and dis-
appear.

The rural classes, owing perhaps to their having
only recently got free access to the soil, covet the
enjoyments of landed property beyond all others.
The idea of becoming landowners affords to them a
satisfaction so keen as not always to allow them to
make a prudent calculation of the attendant draw-
backs. It is not only as a means of gaining a liveli-
hood, as a source of fortune, as a place whereon to
expend their labours, that peasant-proprietors are at-
tached to the fields which they possess — it is also as a
title of consideration before their equals; and nothing
is more painful to them than to relinquish the smallest
part of them. The less informed they are, the more
influence such a passion exercises over them ; and
rarely do children, who have aided their father
in his labours and co-operated in the improvements
he has made, come to the resolution of selling
the heritage which devolves on them. Each wishes
to have his share of it, and hence arise the partitions
which separate and divide the different portions of
farms. On the other hand, among those whose pos-
sessions are not sufficient to employ their whole time,
there are some who would feel it as a sort of degra-
dation to work for hire ; thus occasioning a loss of
time and energy, means of wealth neglected, and
sufferings which might all be obviated. These evils
have assuredly a certain gravity, and it would be
desirable that they did not exist ; but this, at least,

57

may be said of them, that if they are great they
cannot be of long continuance, and that the inordinate
love of property from which they spring cannot per-
petuate those forms of production, whose increasing
inefficiency would prevent proprietor-cultivators from
supporting a competition with other producers.

There is a certain number of communes (or
parishes) in France where almost the whole land has
passed into the hands of the labouring class. Well,
with property have not become extinct in the peasant
the industrial qualities that enabled him to become a
proprietor ; the knowledge of his interests has not
disappeared because he has lands of his own, — far
from that, he is thereby excited to put forth more
energy and activity ; and if it be true that the sub-
division of his lands is a loss, and that it would have
been better to have kept them united, it is at least
certain that the evil is more than counterbalanced by
the zeal and skill which he expends upon them.

Suppose that it were otherwise, that the faulty al-
location, or the smallness of the lots of each culti-
vator, come to have the effect of lessening the
quantity and value of the crops raised, it is very clear
what would happen : The inhabitants would become
gradually poorer, and lands, of which they did not
know how to make a profitable use, would finally
pass into the hands of others. Such would be the
inevitable result. In vain would proprietor-farmers
desire to preserve their fields, too far scattered, or
become too small to remunerate their labours ; they
would succumb in the long run, as is the case with
all other industrial persons, whose establishments or

58

processes of fabrication can no longer maintain a
competition with others, and their lands, burdened
with debts more than can be met, would pass into
the hands of new masters, who would not fail to
change and amend the use made of them.

We at times perceive populations in possession of
fields, which they cultivate, groaning under a load of
distress, to remove which all their efforts are power-
less. The excessive partition of the soil has been
blamed for this, as if, in almost every case of the
kind, the evil could not be traced to the species of
industry which the most of these parties exercised.
What has created among them at once small pro-
perties and small farms, is the nature of the labours
with which they are occupied. They raise but little
of the prime necessaries of life in general demand.
The products which they seek to rear are chiefly
those that exact much manual labour on a small
space, and fetch the highest prices, but which, from
their very nature, have a less steady sale, and are the
most exposed to accidents. A frost that destroys
the blossoms of the fruit trees, an unlocked for com-
petition that lowers the price, or a falling off in the
demand, furnish causes enough to bring ruin on
parties whose whole means of livelihood are some
plots of land, the produce of which has lost a part of
its value. Farmers quit when their capitals cease to
render them the usual profits ; proprietors cannot do
the same ; nailed to the soil that is their own, they
continue to demand from it the means of subsistence ;
their resources are exhausted by degrees ; with their
distress comes an increasing derangement of labour,

59

and misery comes to press heavily on families de-
serving of a better lot.

In the environs of Paris there are many communes
where the small possessions, cultivated by their
owners, are exceedingly productive. More than a
half of the ground is planted with vines, fruit trees,
or kitchen vegetables ; the rest is exclusively set
apart for artificial grasses or corn. The consumption
of the capital has there given rise to such a distribu-
tion of crops ; and what first led to its prosperity was
the high price of the ordinary wine, at the period
when the war left to the products of the south no
other means of conveyance than the highways. But
for nearly thirty years, the wines, whose sale formed
the wealth of Argenteuil and Suresne, have been
almost constantly falling in price ; and if the opening
of less costly modes of communication comes to
add to the difficulties of the competition against
which they have now to contend, there is no doubt
that the producers, forced to abandon the principal
branch of their industry, will have to struggle with
sufferings which will oblige them to make heavy and
numerous sacrifices.

Such are the dangers that menace and sometimes
afflict the majority of possessions, which the delicate
nature of their produce confines within narrow limits.
Everything that contracts the market, or brings new
venders into it, operates to their prejudice. They
are, in the order of farming, what, in the order of
manufactures, are the small establishments that supply
articles of a finer description for a limited circle of
customers ; they fail from a want of sales and other

60

accidents, from which are exempt the industries oc-
cupied with common productions. And the popula-
tion is the less able to bear the shock that it is only
sustained by small capitals sunk on the soil, from
which it cannot withdraw the smallest part without
reducing the field, which is the basis of its opera-
tions.

Complaints are at present heard in Germany of
the distressed state of certain of the rural popula-
tions. To believe many agricultural writers, there
are villages where the peasant-proprietors draw from-
their small fields returns so entirely inadequate that
their debts and difficulties go on increasing from year
to year. Whatever may be the causes of this (and
perhaps none is more likely to be found than the
changes worked on the state of the market by the
German Custom-house Union), the governments that
have sought a remedy for the evil in assigning a
minimum extent for meadow and arable lands, would
have acted more wisely by doing nothing at all.
Time would have sufficed to accomplish the object in
view, and we desire no better proof of this than the
very statements of one of the writers who called out
most loudly for the intervention of these govern-
ments.

See, then, what M. Emile Jacquemin, in his work
on the " Agricultural, Commercial, and Political
State of Germany/' says in regard to a village in the
Duchy of Nassau : —

" The breaking down of properties exists here with
all its fatal consequences. The number of proprietors
of the third order, that is to say, of those who, not

61

being able to keep a plough, are obliged to make use
of the spade, increases in a frightful proportion ; and
poverty and ruin keep pace with it. The land, al-
ready bankrupt, becomes charged with debts at every
new succession, in which there are several heirs.
Borne down by debts, the succeeding heir cannot long
maintain his position. The first bad crop throws
him on his back ; a hail-storm, a murrain, a burning,
a fall in the markets, are sufficient to complete his
ruin. Not being any longer able to pay the interest
of the capital for which his property is mortgaged,
a judicial sale of it becomes inevitable. The pro-
perty then passes into other hands, but run out and
exhausted ; for its former owner, while making every
effort to postpone as long as possible the evil day,
had sold the dung and straw, and ruined the land by
over-cropping. Nine-tenths of the property of
Gimmerich are in this worn-out condition, so that
compulsory sales become every year more frequent."
He then adds — " The price of a property thus
dilapidated cannot be raised ; and the great proprietor
is enabled to purchase it the more easily that he is
not exposed to the competition of the adjoining small
proprietors. Thus, under the subsisting system of
rural legislation, we see, on the one hand, great pro-
prietors tend to absorb the small, and the land fall
into the hands of a few ; and, on the other, the pro-
cess of subdivision extending itself indefinitely. These
twin evils are in most parts of Germany, as in France,
making frightful progress ; and an intermediate order
of proprietors, which ought to constitute the normal
state of a nation, threatens to disappear entirely."

62

And in a more advanced part of his work he ob-
serves : — " And these forced sales are at the present
time by no means rare ; thousands of them take place
in a country relatively of small extent. They are
alike injurious to the State as to individual families ;
they are, above all, a source of disorganisation for
the rural communes, for they attack their prosperity
at the root."

Well, then, admitting that the facts are as M. Emile
Jacquemin describes, and we have no reason to
doubt of their being so, is it not evident that there is
a point where their course is arrested, and that from
the very aggravation of the evil finally proceeds its
remedy ? Here are cultivators, whom the ambition
of becoming proprietors misled, and rendered blind to
their own interests ; they allowed their property to be
broken down and scattered in such a manner that it
ceased to remunerate them. What followed ? Simply
this, that their lands passed into the hands of others,
who cultivated them properly, and that their mode
of farming was succeeded by another more judicious
and lucrative. What we beheld take place at Gem-
merich is the accomplishment of a law, which pre-
sides over all transformations of an economic order —
a law which condemns unskilful producers to transfer
to other hands the agents of production, of which
they are unable to make a proper use.

This law operates equally in agriculture as in
manufactures and trade ; and the possession of the
soil does not liberate proprietors from its influence.
As soon as their mode of farming does not yield as
much as another would do, as soon as they fail to

63

adopt the means of regenerating it, their ruin becomes
inevitable. If they refuse, and go on consuming by
little and little the land or territorial capital, it is
crushed at last under the weight of mortgages ; and
the time always comes when properties and persons
change simultaneously.

Let properties and farms be small or great, it
matters little in such a case what order of things
comes to prevail, for it is always preferable to that
which precedes it. Every new system can only
succeed in getting possession of the soil on condition
of complying with the necessities of its situation. If
it were otherwise, that system would not take root at
all, or would soon pass away. The economical
regime, which now banishes judicial sales from Gem-
merich, did not sooner obtain the preference only by not
being superior to the preceding. Perhaps the regime,
which is now being substituted, will be beaten in its turn.
Such changes are frequent, and are not effected with-
out leaving "behind them evils and sufferings ; but the
issue of them is favourable to the interests of society,
for they change the pre-existing state only to impart
to labour ameliorations, that multiply the riches which
it creates and distributes among all ranks.

" But," says M. Jacquemin, " the lands, before
passing into new hands, have been deteriorated, run-
out, and exhausted, and bring low prices at the
forced sales of them/' And is there in this anything
to be astonished at? The noxious expedients re-
sorted to by small proprietors to retain possession of
patrimonies, to which they are attached by so many
ties of interest and affection, are what other men

64

more enlightened than they have recourse to. How
many manufacturers, for example, persist in keeping
the establishments which they are unable to put in a
state to compete with others in their vicinity ? They,
too, turn into money all that they can detach from their
works ; they dispose of machinery, borrow at a high
rate of interest, and recoil before no means of staving
off a bankruptcy. And when they are at last obliged
to abandon the seat of their industry, the new owners
find nothing but buildings out of repair, utensils
worn out, and machinery old and defective. There
is no occasion to be impelled by the double attach-
ment, which is begotten of the union of property and
its cultivation, to become the victim of such errors.
No country is without proprietors who end by ruin-
ing themselves by attempting to retain estates whose
rental is insufficient to meet the interest of their debts.
They cut down the woods before their time ; they
leave the farm-buildings and fences to crumble down
for want of repairs ; they lengthen the leases in order
to obtain from the farmers advances of money, which
their necessities force them to raise on any terms ;
and in thus putting off the day of their expropria-
tion, they only aggravate a situation previously irre-
trievable.

Like all the sentiments whose energy promotes
the development of order and the power of society,
the love of property excites passions that lead to ex-
cesses and errors ; but whatever abuses and mistakes
it may engender, how numerous are the advantages
resulting from it ? Observe what industrious activity
it keeps up in the country districts, whose mixed pro-

65

duce supplies Paris with fruit, vegetables, and delicate
high-priced articles. There, individuals, who began
life as poor day-labourers, have acquired, foot by foot,
the land which they occupy ; and hardly have they
become landowners, than they effect improvements,
which their predecessors, proprietors and farmers,
never dreamt the possibility of. Planting, drain-
ing, manuring, levelling, trenching — nothing that
holds out a hope of profit is left undone by cultiva-
tors free to act as they choose, and certain of being
able to reap themselves the fruit of their labours. No-
where have savings so long and carefully amassed
been expended on the soil — nowhere is it managed
with so much judgment and unremitting attention —
nowhere, in short, do the rich crops, which it pro-
duces, diffuse a comfort so general and so well de-
served.

Nor is it only in the vicinity of great towns, where
the consumption facilitates and largely remunerates
particular kinds of labour, that we behold the union
of property and farming productive of such excellent
results. Other districts of France, the greater part
of the Swiss Cantons, Eyderstedt, and certain parts
of Wurtemberg, present similar examples. And
even if it be true that the too passionate attachment
of cultivators to their paternal acres does, in certain
cases, reduce their possessions to a size too small for
the wellbeing of those who cultivate them, has it not
been asserted that the same thing happens in a coun-
try where the rural class does not enjoy the advan-
tages of property ? Is it not a fact that the metayers
of Labour, of several parts of the Marche of Ancona,,

66

and of other states of Italy, are in a state of indi-
gence, from which their indefatigable activity ought
to have preserved them ? And are not the greatest
estates in Ireland covered with swarms of poor cot-
tagers, crushed under the weight of the enormous
rents imposed on farms, whose inadequate extent
. condemns them to vegetate in the most hopeless
misery ?

It is therefore wrong to attribute to the spirit that
animates small proprietor-cultivators evils which are
found to prevail in an equal, if not greater, degree in
countries where the soil is only owned by rich indi-
viduals, who have nothing to do with its cultivation.
In all places the same circumstances do not at once
determine the organisation of farms, and regulate the
distribution of property. To produce at the cheapest
possible rate, in order to be able to sell at the same
price as other producers — in this lies the necessity
which will ever rule agricultural and manufacturing
concerns. That necessity, all cultivators are aware
of it — all proprietors or farmers submit to it — because
all know that land, as well as moveable capital, does
not remain long in the hands of those who do not
know how to turn it to a good account.

Still it does not follow from what is above stated
that we refuse to concede to the laws which regulate
successions and transfers of land all influence on the
state of the rural districts. There is now no question
before us except as to the dimensions of farms ; and
if we maintain that these depend only in a few cases
on the size of estates, the scope of our observations
goes that far and no farther. We know that the

67

civil laws of a country affect all parts of the social
economy, and that agriculture does not escape their
influence. Although these laws are unable to mould
it into given forms, and to trace out to it invariable
modes of application, they, at least, affect its develop-
ment, and are able, by facilitating or impeding the
course of wealth and industry, to accelerate or retard
the changes which increase its prosperity.

In this respect, laws which raise up no obstacle to
the circulation and diffusion of landed property, and
others which reserve it for a small number, and tend
to agglomerate it, do not produce the same effect ;
the first, by making the soil accessible to all, leave
society, as a whole, under the impulse of agencies
the most essential to its progress ; the others, in pro-
portion to their stringency, are unfavourable to the
formation of habits of order, economy, and activity,
which the labouring classes require, in order to call
forth all their productive capacity. But we repeat,
it is not on the size of farms, it is on their fecundity,
that such laws exert an influence. Let those states
of Germany that are now passing laws decreeing the
indivisibility of parcels of land, whose diminution
they deem incompatible with the interests of agricul-
ture, reflect a little, and they will perceive how im-
potent their enactments are, and how much they fall
short of their object ; for those same fields, the sale
of which is only permitted to a single purchaser, may
still, if he finds his advantage in so doing, be divided
among several small farmers. When it is intended
to regulate the modes and forms of management, it
is to the farming, and not to the property, that the

68

legislator ought to direct his measures ; but in that
case, what obstacles and inconveniences would he not
create for an industry, which can only prosper by
being freely permitted to follow the 'consumption in
its successive changes ? What embarrassments and
insurmountable difficulties would not soon start up
to reveal the absurdity of his measures ? Agricultu-
ral facts are of the number of those of which the
wisest statesman can never be so sure of unravelling
the complexity, or of grasping the whole of them at
once, as to be able to prescribe the course to be fol-
lowed ; and as often as he may attempt to do so, it
is under the penalty of producing evils infinitely
greater than those which he aims at removing.

CHAPTER VIII.

ON THE PRODUCTIVE POWERS OF FARMS OF DIFFERENT
SIZES.

Having noticed the causes which most powerfully
contribute to produce diversities in the S3'stems of
rural organisation, we now proceed to inquire if
among them there are any which extract from the
soil a more valuable return than the rest. All do
not require the same care and labour — all do not
people the country with cultivators equally rich or
enlightened, nor allow either the same sort of crops,
or the same use being made of the soil. Such points
of difference being sufficiently strong to produce an
influence on the power of labour, let us see if such
be actually their effects, and if there be some mode of

69

carrying on farming, to which we ought to award the
palm of superiority.

A few words are necessary, at the outset, on the
import of the terms commonly made use of in treat-
ing of agricultural questions. The terms great,
middle-sized, and small farms, are purely relative,
and are not, in all places, applied to the same identi-
cal superficial contents. Farms, designed as great
in certain countries, would, in others, be considered
as middle-sized or small. Thus is there in the sizes
of farms infinitely more variety than the ordinary
classifications of them express. For our part, it is
according to the magnitude of the means of produc-
tion which they concentrate in the same hands, that
we shall design the different orders of farms ; we shall,
therefore, name small those that do not each support
a plough and team ; middle-sized, those that employ
from one to two ; and great, all those that require
more than two.

This mode of defining farms, although conformable
to rural practice, does not still reach the degree of pre-
cision that is desirable. The size and strength of
the animals employed in labour, the use of oxen or
horses, the nature of the soil, the more or less con-
tinuous succession of crops, the degree of activity
in the field labour, the unequal endurance of the fal-
lows, green crops, and pastures — all these circum-
stances, different according to the localities, have an
influence in fixing the quantity of land which may be
sufficient for a plough. Notwithstanding, in spite of
the defects in the standard which we have adopted,
we shall hold as small, the farms that contain less

70

than fifteen hectares ; as middle-sized, those whose
contents vary from fifteen to forty ; and as great,
those of a more considerable size.

Some writers on agriculture have proposed to
name small only thpse possessions that are laboured
with the spade, and which rarely exceed two hec-
tares. It is, however, certain that such farms form a
class apart ; and it would be enough to mention their
distinctive character, if there were any question about
them here. At present we have exclusively to do
with farms, which, supplying the principal wants of
consumption, constitute the general agricultural order
in the different countries of Europe. We shall, for
the same reason, leave out of view horticulture, and
the kinds of cultivation that most approximate to -it.

Since the time when the controversy relative to the
size of farms originated, the allegations put forward
by the partisans of the different systems have re-
mained the same. What was asserted more than
sixty years ago of great and small farms, is repeated
at the present day, and is easy to recapitulate.

The advocates of great farms state their case as
follows : —

The greater the farms are, the more do the large
capitals, which the working of them requires, contri-
bute to attract to the vocation of a farmer men who
unite wealth to the advantages of education ; such
persons naturally display in their operations a degree
of skill which is wanting to small farmers less at their
ease and worse educated ; all practicable improve-
ments find in the former intelligent undertakers ; and
their desire to effect them is the greater, that the pro-

71

fit derived from these operations is proportionate to
the extent of the surfaces over which they extend.

Besides, great farms are the only ones that possess
the advantages that result from the separation of
tasks ; the labourers on these have all their separate
occupations ; and, owing to this speciality in their
mode of employment, they acquire a degree of dex-
terity which is wanting to men who are obliged to
apply themselves by turns to several kinds of work,
which, to be well done, require various aptitudes.

On the other hand, to the economy of manual
labour arising from the proper division of it, is joined
that which results from the extent of the surfaces to
which it is directed. Fewer ploughs and animals for
draught are required, and this saving permits a
greater number of bestial to be reared for sale. An-
other advantage attached to large farms is, that they
support sheep in sufficient numbers to pay the expense
of herding and tending, while this augmentation of
live-stock furnishes those abundant and rich manures
indispensable for obtaining plentiful crops.

Finally, less capital is required for organising such
farms relatively to their size. Dwelling-houses,
barns, and other farm-buildings, all increase in num-
ber according as the farms are reduced in size, and
small farms thus occasion the greatest amount of un-
productive outlay.*

* Note by the Translator. — As the subject of farmhouses
and offices occurs more than once in the work, and may give
rise to misapprehension on the part of some readers, especially
those who have no personal knowledge of the rural districts of
France, it seems proper to offer a few explanations. Whenever,
then, the farms are large or middle-sized, the buildings nects-

72

Thus farming on a great scale effects more economy
in men, animals, and capital — has less cost of produc-
tion chargeable on its returns, and leaves an excess,
whose superiority furnishes the classes not engaged in
agriculture with more abundant means of subsistence.

To these statements the partisans of small farms
opposed others entirely different. Small farmers,
said they, display, in the smallest details of their
business, a care and attention productive of the
greatest advantage. There is not a spot of their
fields of which they do not know all the capabilities,
and on which they do not bestow the appropriate im-
provements and culture. Productions which great
farmers cannot take up their time with, are for them
a mean of profit ; and those of the poultry -yard and
dairy, in particular, generally furnish to small farmers
an extra source of income, which .adds considerably
to what they draw from the land.

Small farmers employ few labourers, and the

sary for the farmer and his stock are generally found, as in
Britain, standing on the farms ; but in the case of small farms,
or parcels of land, which are seen lying together, and often
covering a great surface of open unenclosed land, unbroken by
fence or building, the cultivators, whether they be the pro-
prietors or tenants of such lands, usually live in the adjacent
towns or villages, where they often have dwellings and other
buildings that have different owners from the land ; and unite
to farming some other vocation, such as that of innkeeper,
carrier, cowfeeder, &c. The origin of these agricultural
villages, which are to be seen in most districts, has, by some,
been traced to the feudal times, when an isolated residence was
insecure, and, by others, to the social character of the French
people. However this may be, the utility and convenience of
such village aggregations are indisputable. It may also be
noticed that a French hectare is equal to a little less than 2£
English acres.

73

greater part of the farm-work is done by the tenant
and his family with a degree of zeal and intelligence
that is never found in hirelings, who have the interests
of their master so little at heart. The reproach pre-
ferred against them of a want of means to improve
their land is unfounded, for if the profits which they
realise are limited, the surfaces which they have to
keep or put in good condition are restricted, and only
require advances corresponding to their size.

It is not true that small farms rear fewer bestial
than great, relative to their size. If sheep are less
numerous on them, cattle are more so ; and this may
be almost taken for granted, seeing that the products
which they raise, and from which they derive their
profits, are those that generally require the most
manure.

It is alleged that they require both more hands
and a greater outlay for farm-buildings than large
farms; but what does that signify if the surplus of
the gross produce which they furnish suffices to cover
all the additional expenses which they may so
occasion. The extra labour which they demand is
even an advantage when their net produce is not in-
ferior to that of other farms, for, then, supporting a
far denser rural population with an equal number of
the manufacturing class, they contribute more than
all others to the strength and power of the state.

As we have already had occasion to remark, middle-
sized farms were for a long time without organs or
champions. If Shaw, in his " Essay on the Low
Countries," pronounced a reasoned eulogium on them,
it was only in 1823 that they found, in M. Cordier, a

G

skilful appreciates and a zealous partisan. That
writer, in his «' Memoir on the Agriculture of French
Flanders," did not hesitate to consider the farms of
20 to 30 hectares of French Flanders as the most
productive of any; and he assigned to those in the
Arrondissement of Lisle, a little inferior even in size,
a superiority over the large farms of France and
England. Among the reasons which he urged in
support of this opinion, the most prominent are the
saving in point of conveyance from the fields to the
steading, the continuous employment of men and
horses, the variety of the crops, and the labours, of
which the regular distribution renders it unnecessary
to have recourse to extra labourers, whom large
farms cannot do without, and whose services are so
very costly.

Such are the reasons urged on both sides in favour
of the different modes of culture. For our part, we
conceive that these reasons are all, to a certain extent,
well founded, for there is no rural regime which has
not at once its peculiar advantages and drawbacks;
and the question, therefore, is, what proportion do
they bear to each other ? To discover if the pre-
eminence of fortune and intelligence attributed to
great farmers operates, in the long run, better and
more profitably than the personal activity and the
careful attentions which small farmers display in the
smallest details of their business ; to see if the larger
capitals of the one, applied to vast surfaces, render
them more productive than the smaller capitals of the
others, employed on smaller spaces. These are the
questions that have perplexed observers the most free

75

from the prejudices of system, and which caused one of
them, M. Sismondi, in his " View of the Agriculture
of Tuscany," to say — " That the question relative to
large and small farms is one of the most puzzling and
complicated possible, although a great number of
writers on both sides have solved it with a prompti-
tude which shows that they had only co nsidered it
hastily and under a single point of view."

That this question has, in most cases, been con-
sidered only in a partial and one-sided manner, and
very superficially, is certainly true ; but is it, for all
that, inextricable ? arid would it not have been solved
and set at rest long ago, if, as Sismondi himself
states, it had been put in the shape of the following
problem : — " In order to obtain from farming the
greatest possible profit, without having respect to the
value of the gross, but only to that of the net pro-
duce, is it necessary to unite farms ? and is it upon
the largest farms that the profits are found to be the
most considerable ?" (Note XIX.)

In fact, it is in the amount of the profit, or net
produce — that is to say, in the amount represented
by the portion of the gross product left after paying
the attendant expenses — that we must seek for the
true criterion of the goodness of the different modes
of farming, and the certain test of their comparative
excellence. Of two industrial establishments of the
same magnitude, to that which a final casting up
of accounts leaves the greatest profit, necessarily
belongs the superiority. In agriculture it is the
earth itself that forms the material operated upon ;
and as soon as, after deducting the whole sums ex-

76

pended on it, a system of management causes it to
yield, on an equal surface, a greater surplus, or net
produce, than others, that fact is sufficient to entitle
the system to be considered the most efficient and
best of any.

What has given rise to so much doubt and un-
certainty on this subject is, that in place of seizing
on the above mentioned fact in all its simplicity, and
so confining the inquiry to estimating the amount of
the net produce by the extent of surface cultivated,
inquirers have insisted on putting into the balance
the quantities of capital and labour by means of
which that amount is obtained. This is the mistake
into which Sismondi and most of the writers who
have handled the question have fallen — a mistake
that necessarily leads us to regard uncultivated lands,
where man may gather a few fruits growing up
spontaneously and without culture at all, as the most
productive ; and which led Arthur Young, as soon
as he perceived the absurd conclusion to which it
led, to seek, in the greatest quantity carried to the
market, another means, scarcely less defective, of
estimating the relative capabilities of the different
orders of farms. A small degree of attention to facts
ought, as seems to us, to have dissipated all doubts
on the matter. Every individual enterprise demands
expenses, and thence comes the division of the
returns into two parts, the one that which reimburses
the producer for his advances, and the other which,
remaining under the title of surplus, forms the wealth
created, and whose magnitude attests the degree of
energy and skill displayed in the work. To take an

77

account of the advances only, is to forget that these
advances have been refunded, and that there is no
surplus until they have been completely cleared off.

In agriculture the special expenses vary with the
descriptions of the produce. For example, a hectare
of meadow land may yield a crop worth 200f., at an
outlay of 40f. for manual labour ; a hectare in wheat,
on the contrary, may occasion 140f. of cost to pro-
duce a gross return of 300f. Will it be inferred
from this, that the rearing of the crop of hay, by not
costing, on an equal surface, more than a third of
that of the wheat, is three times more lucrative ?
This would be falling into a strange mistake. In
both cases the outlay, although very unequal, has
been completely refunded ; in both a surplus of a
like amount has been realised; and had the grain
crop been only in a slight degree more productive,
it would have been the one that added the most to
the profits of the farmer and the wealth of the soil.
Well, there is no other rule for appreciating general
systems of farming than there is for judging of the
value of different crops ; and if there be some whose
expenses are larger than those of others, they can
have no surplus, or net return, unless the total of the
gross produce is sufficiently great to compensate for
the extra charges.

There is, therefore, no need for our occupying
ourselves with the proportions of money and manual
labour, which concur in production. The services
of both of these agents have a distinct remunera^
tion, regulated by their degree of utility ; and what-
ever their amount may be, it is the net product alone

G2

78

which gives the measure of the more or less ad-
vanced state of the art, and of the greater or less
efficiency of the systems of labour. It is, moreover,
to be remarked that all farming improvements can
only be the fruits of an increased expenditure, whose
reimbursement is effected by means of the surplus
produce which they create. Beginning with waste
lands and ending with the most fertile gardens, the
advances made on the soil augment progressively ;
but the crops multiply in a still higher ratio ; and the
countries yielding the highest net as well as gross
agricultural returns, are those where the soil has been
cultivated in the most careful, pains-taking, and,
consequently, most expensive manner.

It was needful to enter into the foregoing details
to obviate the chance of falling into a mistake, which
has been fatal to many of the attempts made to show the
efficiency peculiar to the different systems of farming.
Of that efficiency there can be no test or proof other
than the amount of net produce which they realise
on an equal surface ; but even here the data are not
so easy to collect as one might at first be inclined to
suppose ; and, before going in search of them, we
shall offer some explanations.

It is usual to take the rent as the expression or
index of the net farming produce ; but that index is,
for the most part, neither complete nor easy to
reduce to its true import. The rent is far from con-
stituting the total of the net produce of the soil ; for
it is exclusive of the taxes as often as the landlords
do not themselves pay the full amount of the general
and local burdens, as well as of that part of the crop

79

which, after paying the cost of labour, remains in the
hands of the farmer in the shape of net profit — a
portion always considerable, and which often amounts
to a half of the rent ; but if, on the one hand, the
rent does not include the entire net produce, it, on
the other, contains the sums which, only representing
the interest of the capital sunk in farm buildings,
cannot be considered as a part of the rent paid for the
land. (Note XX.)

It is necessary to keep the above stated fact con-
stantly in view in forming a comparative estimate of
the net produce ; and another, still more powerful, is
found in the influence exercised by the prices of
farm produce on the amount of the rent. Rent con-
sists in reality of a portion of the crop, and rises or
falls according to its market price. Suppose, for
example, two countries, with farmers equally skilful,
are able to devote the same quantity of produce to
the rent of lands of an equal extent, the rent payable
to the landlord, converted into money, will be higher
in that country where the fruits of the earth have the
highest market value ; as, for example, in the vicinity
of Bordeaux, where wheat brings from 20f. to 21f. the
hectolitre, than in Lorraine, where it sells from 15f.
to I6f. ; and still the art of farming, as exercised in
these widely separated districts, is equally productive.

Farther, facts generally recognised show how im-
portant it is, in comparing the rates of rent, not to
confound the amount of it with the quantity of the
produce set aside for its payment. During the last
thirty years the rent of land has been gradually fall-
ing in England. Farmers who, in 1812, took lands

80

at the rate of from 45s. to 70s. per acre, only
give for the same, at present, from 20s. to 30s.
(Porter, vol. i. p. 166); and whoever would fix upon
this fact to measure the productive power of English
agriculture, would infer that it has greatly declined.
Still, it is not so ; for wheat which, in 1812, fetched
as much as 122s. a quarter now only brings 60s.
It is, besides, to be kept in view that, computed in
wheat, that part of the crop which falls to the land-
lord did not fail to diminish — it fell off from 57 to 60
per cent, per acre. This is another effect of the differ-
ences of market prices. According as wheat fell in price
farmers were compelled, in order to make good the
costs of labour and to realise the requisite profits, to
reserve to themselves a larger portion of the produce
whose marketable value had diminished. The con-
trary was the case during the period of high prices.
Such important and obvious effects, arising from the
variations in the price of farm produce, show into
what errors we are apt to fall if we do not keep them
steadily in view, and what rectifications are indis-
pensable in order to give to facts their real character
and import.

There is yet another cause of error which it is
requisite to notice, and that is the influence which,
in regard to net produce, arises from local causes,
and more particularly from the density of the
population. The fewer inhabitants a country has,
there is the more land for them, and the less pains
are bestowed on its cultivation. Parties, whose
possessions contain more land than they can profit-
ably cultivate, confine themselves to sowing, in

81

succession, some portions of them, which they allow
to rest, at times for several years running, after
having taken from them a single crop. Such is the
mode of husbandry pursued by the rich farmers of
the United States, as well as the serfs of the north of
Europe, because it is, on the whole, the least ex-
pensive, wherever a deficient population necessitates
the leaving the greater part of the soil unlaboured.
But it is easy to perceive how much the net produce,
taking into view the arable surface of which certain
portions are only each year under crop, must appear
small, and how difficult it would be to compare it
with what is realised in countries where the increas-
ing wants of consumption have led to the suppression
of fallows, or have, at least, confined them to very
narrow portions of the soil.

We now proceed to give an arithmetical exposition
of rents, drawn from sources which we have every
reason to believe correct — observing that we shall
only rectify those figures in it which serve us for
judging of the merits of the different forms of rural
production. These ciphers are the highest which, on
an average, are found in the best cultivated countries ;
and we have drawn them from these countries in order
to have to compare the results of systems of manage-
ment arrived at such a degree of advancement, as
to enable us to appreciate their real excellence.
All of them are taken from possessions on which corn
is grown, and all are computed on surfaces sufficiently
extensive to exclude any peculiarities of situation or
soil which might have an influence on the value of the
crops.

82

LARGE FARMS.

Average Rate of Rent per Hectare-

FRANCS.

ENGLAND. ..Counties of Lincoln and Northumberland—

(Note XXI.) Ill

Counties of Wilts, Berks, Durham, and York, 92

FRANCE Brie, Beauce, Vexin, Picardy, Normandy,

Flanders, arrondissements of Dunkirk, of
Avesne, and Cambray— (Note XXII.) * 75

MIDDLE-SIZED FARMS.

ITALY Milanais — Farms of from 15 to 20 hectares —

(Note XXIII.) 240

FRANCE Departments of the north — Farms from 15

to 30 hectares 90

Departments lying betwixt the Belgian-
frontier and Brittany 80

SMALL FARMS.

SPAIN Lower Catalonia, and the kingdom of

Valentia 260

ITALY Tuscany — Countries of Lucca, Sienna, and

Bergamma 230

BELGIUM... Country of the Wals and Termonde, 100 to 160

FRANCE Several cantons of the departments of the

Seine and Oise (Note XXIV) 100 to 180

Departments of the north, 100 to 120

Departments of Alsace, Artois, Picardy and
Normandy, 80 to 100

Now, what is the signification of these figures, and
what conclusions ought we to draw from them ?
First, there are some of them which we only cite in
the way of information, without intending to make
any use of them. If, for example, the small farms of
Spain and Italy exhibit so great a superiority in point
of produce, they are not indebted for this to any
peculiarity of size, but to that of climate. Owing to
its fostering heat, the different crops succeed each
other almost without interruption ; the cultivator has
little or no resting-time, and wherever water is to be

83

bad, the earth never fails to yield a produce greatly
surpassing in abundance anything known in the rest
of Europe. There is, accordingly, betwixt these two
countries, and others not having the same advantages,
whether of climate or species of production, no com-
parison possible. Their mode of cultivation is admi-
rably adapted to the circumstances of their situation,
but if art turns the latter to profit, it does not contri-
bute to create them.

In the same way, we will not occupy ourselves
with the rents of the small farms of several cantons
of the departments of the Seine and Oise, where the
rate of the rents is owing to their proximity to Paris ;
and, besides, among the products that go to fix it, are
vines, orchards, and certain kinds of garden stuffs.
In order that our researches may be as conclusive as
their nature admits of, it is necessary to confine
them to districts where the conditions of cultivation
differ in the least degree possible from each other.

For this purpose, it is in England and Belgium,
and especially in the north of France, that we shall
compare the results given by farms of different sizes.
In these countries, the climate, species of crops, and
everything down to the density of the population, are
so nearly alike as to offer a sufficiently accurate basis
for drawing our conclusions.

Now, in taking for our rule the existing rate of
rents in these countries, and they are the highest
which it is possible to find on spaces of some extent,
we have on an average the following ciphers —

FRANCS.

Large farms, per hectare (Note XXV.) 102

Middle-sized 85

Small- ,...110

84

It now remains to apply to these numbers the
modifications or corrections without which it would
be'impossible to regard them as expressing, with any-
thing like sufficient accuracy, the amount of the net
produce of the farms to which they refer.

The first of these modifications consists in subtract-
ing from the rents a sum to meet the interest of the
capital laid out by the landlord on farm buildings. It
is difficult to obtain thoroughly correct information
on this head ; still it seems to us that we would be
pretty near the truth in setting down the deduction to
be made, at a tenth of the rent on large farms, at a
seventh of it on those of a middle size, and at a fifth,
at least, on small farms. Thus would we have for
rent, payable for the soil alone, the following sums —

FRANCS.

Large farms 93.

Middle-sized 73

Small 88

It -is, in the next place, necessary to add the taxes
that weigh upon land to the amount of the rent ; but
if we are in a situation to give their rate per hectare
in France, we are unable to do the like as to England.
There, the county and parochial burdens, including
the poor rates, are very high ; but they vary accord-,
ing to the localities, and houses bear a part of them :
besides, there remains the portions of the land tax
unredeemed, tithes, and church rates, which are not
levied in all places, nor everywhere in the same pro-
portion. (Note XXVI.) All that we can assert is,
that the taxes of every kind, to which the soil is sub-
ject, paid by the farmers in the different counties, are,
taken on the whole, less considerable in England than

85

in France ; and that, in keeping them out of view,
owing to our inability to state them precisely, it is
chiefly to the disadvantage of small farms, in our
estimate of the net produce, that this omission
operates.

In regard to the portion of the produce which,
after deducting the costs of cultivation, remains to the
farmer under the head of net profit, it is that whose
omission produces the least inconvenience. In all
places that portion is regulated by competition, by
the common rate of interest, and of industrial profit, and
so ought not to present, taking one sort of farm with
another, or even one country with another (at least in
regard to those of which there is question in our cal-
culations), any very notable differences. Should we
estimate it, in some cases, at 5 per cent, on the capital
embarked, in others, at 6 or 7 (not including interest),
not only would there not be in this a mean of sensibly
changing the proportion of the figures, but the
differences might, perhaps, be considered as answering
to the remuneration of the personal labour, furnished
in unequal degrees, according to the modes of farming
in use.

One thing, on the other hand, is of the greatest
importance, and that is to measure the effects of the
difference in the prices of produce. We have to com-
pare the net quotas of the prices realised in England,
France, and Belgium; and it is indispensable to reduce
them to their first elements. The following, then,
are the average market prices of wheat in these three
countries for the last ten years : — In Belgium, the
average is about 17 francs the hectolitre ; in the north

H

of France, 18f. ; and in England, about 25f. (Note
XXVII.) Still must it be remarked, that the same
disproportion in the market value does not exist in
regard to a very important part of the English crops,
viz., the fodder ; therefore, in taking the quantities of
wheat as the expression of the rate of rent, it is need-
ful to reduce a little the English prices, in order to
have a term of comparison which may include the
whole of the produce, the sale of which, in that
country, serves to pay the rent. It is, therefore, at
22f. only that we state the price of wheat ; and so we
put down 18f. on the one side, and 22f. on the other.

These corrections made, large farms in the most
advanced state would leave, on an average per hectare, a
net appreciable produce of 419 litres of wheat; middle-
sized farms, also in the best condition, would yield
one of 405 ; and small farms, one of 489. Reduced
to a common money standard, at the rate of 20f. the
hectolitre, these quantities would give as the expres-
sion of the productive capacity of the different orders
of farms, 83f. 80 centimes, 8 If., and 97f. 80c.

These figures, in reference to the fallibility of the
data on which they rest, would not be sufficient to
authorise us to declare that there are modes of farm-
ing to which a decisive and constant superiority ought
to be awarded. If small farms appear to surpass the
others, it may still happen that they owe their advan-
tages to temporary or accidental circumstances ; and
we might hesitate to affirm that, in general, they
extract from the soil more wealth than others, if other
facts did not concur to corroborate that testimony in
their favour which our calculations afford.

87

In all countries where the art of agriculture has
attained to the highest perfection, small farms are
those which now bring the highest rents. In England
even, beyond the districts which, from the nature of
the soil, are chiefly set apart for grazing, middle-sized
and small farms only exist and maintain their ground
because they yield rents at least as high as great
farms. In Scotland, in the county of Edinburgh
(Note XXVIII), small farms have the advantage in
this respect ; and in Wales, as in wretched Ireland,
the parcels of land tenanted by the peasants are
let to them at higher rates than the large farms of
England.

In Belgium, where the two systems are in contact,
small farms, wherever the soil is as well suited to
their peculiar mode of production as to that of large
farms, yield higher rents, and are therefore preferred.

It is the same in France, where, in a vast number
of the departments, there exist striking differences
betwixt the sums offered in the shape of rent by small
and great farmers.

It is a certain fact that, of all the departments of
France, those of the north are the best farmed.
Although middle-sized and small farms are there in
the majority, all the systems of farming have a place,
and there are many arrondissements where entire
cantons are almost covered with large farms. Well,
on all these points, the smaller tenants lease their
possessions at higher rates than the others ; and
thence it is that the breaking down of large, with a
view to the formation of small farms, becomes more
and more general. (Note XXIX)

However imposing may be the skill displayed by
the great farmers of England, the state of the incomes
derived from land in that country fully confirms the
conclusions deducible from the calculations presented
by us. It is a fact that the landlord's part is there
not so considerable as the abundance of capital and
the density of the population would lead us to expect.

The average rent in that country is 20s. per acre,
which is less than 62 f. per hectare. But, in Belgium
and France, take the provinces where the population
rises, as in England, to 93 persons per square kilo-
metre, it will be found that in these two countries
the rate of rent valued in produce reaches or exceeds
that amount.

This is not all. Compare the portions of England
where, owing to the excellence and extent of the pas-
tures, the lands yield the highest rents, the region of
the north — which includes the counties of York,
Durham, Cumberland, Lincoln, Northumberland, and
Lancaster — with the equally rich region which takes
in, betwixt the Belgian frontier and the sea, the Oise
and the Seine, the departments of the Pas de Calais,
of the Somme, the Oise and the Seine Inferieure,
nearly all that of the north, a part of those of the
Aisne and the Eure, as well as some of the cantons
of the Seine and the Oise — it is in the French region
that you will find the highest net produce. (Note
XXX.) And the difference would be still more strik-
ing if we caused Belgium to enter into the comparison,
and thus contrasted with the richest portion of the
soil of Britain, a section of territory whose extent
would be nearly equal to a half of the total surface of
England.

89

But it ought not to be so in England. In that
country, a powerful cause is constantly in operation
to keep rents above the rate which, with an equal
aptitude on the part of the cultivators, they can attain
on the Continent, and that is, the higher market price
of the produce. This cause operates in two ways
equally decisive. First, as has been practically esta-
blished in England, before and since 1814, the rent
of land has always risen in a higher ratio than the
price of the produce ; and the reason is, that the far-
mers, when they sell dear, realising, by means of a
smaller portion of the crop, the profits which they
require, are led, by competition, to increase in their
offers the quota set apart for the landlord. On the
other hand, it is the selling price of the produce
which, for the most part, determines the expenses
destined to facilitate and improve the farm operations.
Such improvements, the costs of which would not be
covered by an increase in the quantities raised as long
as prices are low, become profitable, and are effected
when prices rise ; and thence it is that with their rise
are multiplied the expenses destined to add to the pro-
ductive capacity of the soiL It was the high price of
corn which, in England, gave rise during the war to
so many demands for inclosure bills. It is the high
price current at present which continues to insure to
the lands an expenditure that would not otherwise
take place, and which, furnished in a great part by the
landlords, procures for them an interest whose amount
is included in the stipulated rent. But this system
of management joins to considerable advantages in-
conveniences not less real. If it be exceedingly well

H 2

90

adapted to the raising of corn, to the breeding and
feeding of live stock, especially sheep, on the other
hand, it is little suited to the unremitting attention
required in the culture of certain plants which call for
much manual labour, nor to the minute and laborious
operations for bringing in new lands, and thus leaves
neglected very important elements of income. Here
is its weak side ; it is this defect which, in spite of
the aid of the great capitals successively applied to the
soil, prevents it from yielding all that is obtained by
other systems in places where local circumstances are
far from stimulating and remunerating, in an equal
degree, the efforts of art, and the sacrifices requisite
for adding to the produce. (Note XXXI.)

The facts which we have now pointed out merit the
more attention, that many writers on agriculture, by
not perceiving all that English fanning owes solely to
the high price of the produce which it rears, have
attributed to the size of its farms an influence quite
peculiar, and have recommended them as the only ones
capable of communicating to the territorial wealth a
rapid and continued progress. In their eyes, all
industries which are based on farms of a different
order cannot fully attain their object j and small
farms, which are so opposite to those referred to,
have, for that reason, been subjected to perpetual
attacks. They have been reproached with a want of
capital, of running out the soil, of not being capable
of rearing the number of animals necessary for repair-
ing the losses in point of yield which they occasion to
the soil ; and thence the uneasiness manifested as
often as such farms seemed to be making way and

91

multiplying. Certes, a rural regime, which yields, at
least, as much net produce as others, furnishes a
practical answer to the objections taken to it ; but so
great, even amongst men otherwise enlightened, is the
force of prejudices, that it is useful to show how com-
pletely they are refuted by facts.

For this purpose we shall first stop to examine the
reproach cast on small farms, which would undoubtedly
be the heaviest of all, were it well founded, that of
not being capable of breeding a sufficient number of
animals whose presence on farms is indispensable for
procuring the manure, without which the soil, suffer-
ing a gradual exhaustion, would at last come to "yield
crops too scanty to repay the labours of him who
cultivates it. This is the chief objection taken to
small farms, and the one that has hitherto been the
most generally received.

Let us, therefore, see if it be groundless or other-
wise.

There is no doubt that England, on an equal area,
rears the greatest number of animals. Holland alone
can cope with her in this respect ; but is this a result
of the sizes of the farms, and do not climate and local
situation concur in producing it ? That such a com-
bination of causes exists seems to us incontestible.

In short, whatever may be alleged to the contrary,
in all places where great and small farms are found
together, it is the latter, although they feed fewer
sheep, which, on the whole, maintain the greatest
number of animals productive of manure. Look, for
example, at the results of the information furnished
by Belgium on this subject.

92

The two provinces where small farms are most
general, are those of Antwerp and East Flanders ;
and they possess, on an average, for each 100 hectares
of land under cultivation, 74 horned cattle and 14?
sheep. The two provinces laid out in great farms
are those of Namur and Hainault ; and these have, on
an average, for every 100 hectares of cultivated land,
only 30 horned cattle and 45 sheep. But, in com-
puting, as is usually done, 100 sheep as equal to 100
head of cattle, we have, on the one side, 76 animals
keeping up the fertility of the soil, and, on the other,
35 (Note XXXII), an enormous difference certainly.
It is, moreover, to be kept in view that the number of
animals is not, in that part of Belgium where the soil
is divided into very small farms, much less than in
England. In valuing it, in the latter country, accord-
ing only to the rate of the land under cultivation,
there are found to be for 100 hectares 65 horned
cattle and about 260 sheep, equal to 9 1 of the other,
or only 15 more than in Belgium. It is also proper
to observe that, in Belgium, almost no portion is lost
of the manure furnished by the animals stall-fed
nearly the whole year ; whereas in England, where
out-of-door pasturing is followed, the quantity of
manure that can be turned to use is considerably
diminished.

In the departments of the north, also, it is the
arrondissements where the farms are the smallest that
rear the most cattle. While the arrondissement of
Lisle and Hazebrouk, besides a great number of
horses, feed, the one 52 head of cattle, and the other
4-6 ; the arrondissements where the farms are the

93

largest, those of Dunkirk and Avesnes, only produce,
the first 44, and the other 40. (Note XXXIII.)

Similar researches extended over other points of
France present the same results. If it be true that
in the immediate vicinity of large towns small farmers
do not raise animals affording manure, and easily
procure what they require by purchase, it does not
follow that their mode of farming, which exacts most
from the soil, furnishes the least for keeping up its
fertility. Small farms, certainly, cannot keep nume-
rous flocks of sheep, and that is a disadvantage ; but,
to make up for it, they have more cattle than great
farms. This last is a necessary condition of their
existence, wherever the nature of the consumption
calls for their establishment, and, without complying
with it, they would soon disappear.

We have, besides, to offer on the point in question,
certain details whose correctness seems fully attested
by the excellence of the work in which they appear.
They are found in the " Statistics of the Commune
of Vensat" (Puy de Dome), recently published by
Dr Jusseraud, mayor of the commune, and are the
more valuable that they place in the clearest light the
nature of the changes which the increase of small
farms produces on the numbers and kinds of animals
whose produce in manure goes to keep up, and add to,
the fertility of the soil.

In the commune of Vensat, which comprehends
1,612 hectares, divided into 4,600 parcels, belonging
to 591 proprietors, the territory farmed contains
1,464 hectares. Now, in 1790, 17 farms took up
two-thirds of it, and 20 others the rest. Since that

94

period the farms have been subdivided, and at pre-
sent they are of an extremely small size. What has
been the effect of this change on the numbers of the
bestial? In 1790 the commune only had upon it
300 horned cattle, and from 1,800 to 2,000 sheep ;
at present it counts 676 of the former, and only 533
of the latter — so that, to make up for 1,300 sheep, it
has acquired 376 oxen and cows ; and, on the whole,
the quantity of manure has increased in the propor-
tion of 490 to 729, or more than 48 per cent. And
it is, moreover, to be observed that these bestial,
stronger and better fed at present, yield, relatively
to their numbers, a greater quantity of manure for
maintaining the land in good condition.

Behold, then, what facts teach us on this point.
It is, therefore, not true that small farms do not feed
as many bestial as the others ; far from that, where
the local circumstances are alike, they rear the greatest
number ; and that this is the case ought to be pre-
sumed, seeing that as these farms demand most from
the land, they must afford the means of keeping up
its fertility. Let any one take the other reproaches
levelled at small farms, and examine them one by
one, exposed to the light of facts properly appreciated,
and he will soon perceive that they are equally
fallacious, and have been put forward by parties who
had compared the state of farming in different coun-
tries where the causes of agricultural prosperity did
not operate with the same degree of energy.

Nevertheless, we do not consider small farms as
exempt from all disadvantages ; on the contrary, like
all other modes of rural organisation, they have some that

95

r "

are peculiar to them ; but, in such cases, there is noway
of judging except by final results ; and it is enough that
one mode of farming does not yield less net profit than
others, in order to establish that it is not in any re-
spect inferior to them ; and that to make up for the
defects recognised in it, it possesses advantages
which are peculiarly its own. Many causes con-
cur to determine and fix the systems of industrial
production. The state of the arts, of wealth, and of
consumption, has each a certain influence ; and, at every
social epoch, transformations take place owing to the
changes that have occurred in the tastes, wants, and
demands of the population. In agriculture these
transformations have been frequent, and have always
been marked by a rise in rents brought about by their
accomplishment. In this we behold the visible sign
of their utility — the test of their opportuneness — the
principle and cause of their realisation. It will not
be different in the future ; for, in reference to their
own and the general interest, proprietors can never
do better than allow their lands to pass into the hands
of men who offer the highest rents, solely because
their mode of culture has become the best fitted for
extracting from the soil, in existing circumstances, all
that can be drawn from it.

CHAPTER IX.

ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE SIZES OF FARMS ON THE
SOCIAL ECONOMY.

We have now reached a new branch of the subject.
Till now our inquiries have had relation to the

96
i

different systems of agriculture, and the relative
efficiency of their powers of production. We have
now to consider their influence on the social state.
All of them, in order to yield an equal net produce,
do not require the same quantity of manual labour, nor
attach to the soil the like number of families. But
such differences necessarily react on the density and
composition of the population, and are of too much
importance for us not to try to appreciate their prin-
cipal consequences.

From the origin of the controversy touching great
and small farms, this branch of the question has given
rise to the keenest discussions. " The fewer indivi-
duals farming requires, the greater is the quantity of
subsistence furnished to others/' said Arthur Young,
who, proceeding to erect this assertion into an in-
contestible axiom, affirmed, that large farms, being
those that employ fewest hands, possess, in a higher
degree than others, the property of giving an impulse
to commerce, arts, and wealth. In the present day
this opinion still keeps its ground ; and it is, accord-
ingly, usual to see the relative numbers of cultiva-
tors and the rest of the community pointed to as the
real standard, both of the prosperity of farming and
of the industrial power of nations. Let us therefore
scrutinise the grounds of this opinion. We shall
begin by elucidating the facts, and then consider the
consequences resulting from them.

Under whatever system of management the land
may be, the produce is divided into two portions :
the one going to reimburse the expenditure and
remunerate the farmer — the other, devoted to the
payment of the rent, taxes, interest of borrowed

97

capital, immediately passes into the hands of the
classes unconnected with agriculture. Still this
portion is not the only source of subsistence for these
classes. The labour rs themselves require manufac-
tured articles ; rich or poor, farmers, or day-labourers,
all expend money on furniture, lodgings, and
clothes, and all take the amount of such expenses
out of what comes to them in the shape of profits and
wages.

Now, all modes of farming do not employ the
same number of hands to furnish, in equal quantities,
the portion of the total produce which the cultivators
reserve for themselves ; and thence come the differ-
ences in the numbers and proportions of the several
parts of the population.

Suppose, for example, two countries where the
part of the crop that is converted into net produce
is alike sufficient to feed 60 inhabitants per square
kilometre, but where there are required, in the one,
60 cultivators to realise it — and, in the other, only
30; this will occasion a considerable disparity, both
in the cypher of the general population, and in the
respective numbers of the rural and manufacturing
classes. Nor is this the only difference. The cul-
tivators purchase and use manufactured articles, in
exchange for which they give a portion of the fruits
of their own labour ; and, in assuming that this
portion forms a third of what is required for the
subsistence of one man (Note XXXIV), there will
be, on the one side 20 persons, and on the other 10,
in addition to those that are fed by the amount of

i

98

the produce remaining after paying for the farm
labour. The final results would therefore stand
thus : —

«

«S

"S3 i

(2

Q

"3

«*** j

COUNTRIES.

1

£

t*

11 -a 1
f 1*1

1

o

•

•a ~

1

H

i$*|

2 s •« *
£o£

First Country...
Second Country

60
30

80
70

140
100

48 per cent.
30 per rent.

These figures show what modifications may be
introduced into the social state, by systems of farming
which furnish the same net produce by means of an
unequal number of labourers. In the above table
we find, under the title of systems placed in con-
trast, populations which differ at once, both by their
total numbers, and by the occupations into which
they are divided ; but it is essential to remark that,
if the mode of farming which retains the most
families on the rural districts has, proportionally to
that number, the fewest persons of the manufacturing
class, it still is that which, rateably to the surface,
feeds the most of them ; for, while it supports 80 per
square kilometre, the other only nourishes 70.

It is small farms, by reason of the nature of the
products raised on them, that always require the
most manual labour. Thus, as often as they obtain
as great a surplus as other farms, they ought to
yield an increased quantity of gross produce which,

99

in paying an additional number of labourers, ends by
partly passing into the hands of artisans, and so
augments the numbers of the latter. So, while small
farms create, in other proportions than great> the
different fractions of the population, the former also,
on an equal surface, furnish more ample means of
subsistence to the population at large.

What has been now advanced, has been universally
proved by facts wherever it has been found possible
to collect them with any degree of accuracy. (Note
XXXV).

In no country do great farms abound so much as
in England ; and in none does there exist so great a
disproportion between the different classes of the
population. There are computed to be 29 cultivators
in 100 persons of all occupations ; and, admitting
that a fifth of the means of subsistence is imported
every year, there would still be found less than 29
cultivators out of 93 persons living on the produce
of the soil, which would give 31 per cent. (Note
XXXVI).

In Belgium, Italy, and France, in all those dis-
tricts where the land yields a net produce equal or
superior to that of England, the number of cultivators,
compared to the total population, rises in an inverse
ratio to the extent of the farms. It exceeds 40 per
cent, in the Belgian provinces of which Antwerp
and Ghent are the head towns ; 44 in Tuscany and
Lombardy ; 40 on an average in the two departments
of Alsace ; and 43 in the departments of the north.
(Note XXXVII).

100

The following table shows the amount of the
differences in this respect : — *

COUNTRIES.

o '

S 2

I

ENGLAND

FJBANCE That part situated betwixt

the frontiers of Belgium, the Oise,
the sea, and the limits of the Maine
and of Brittany. This region— which
includes, besides the section of the
north which we have compared to
the north of England, the whole of
Normandy — is, in poi n t of exten t, equal
to more than a third of England,
and furnishes, on an average, about the
same net produce— (Note XXXVIII.)

ALSACE. — Departments of the High

Rhine and Low Rhine

Departments of the north

BELGIUM.— East Flanders and the pro-
vince of Antwerp

[TALY — Lombard v

93

97

117
191

188
121

27 66

63

70
109

108
68

This table shows in how great a degree, relative to
the quantity of manual labour which they require,
modes of farming exercise an influence on the com-
position and the density of the population. The
differences which these figures indicate are neverthe-
less attenuated by the want of complete uniformity
in the description of the farms ; for everywhere a
mixed order of them exists ; and, in France, among
others, the region which has furnished us with our data,

101

or terms of comparison, not only contains as many
middle-sized as small farms, but also counts a good
number of great ones. If we were to reduce the facts
to a definitive numerical result, we would say that,
on an average, while small farms employ 40 cultiva-
tors to realise a surplus which would feed 60 other
persons, great farms have only need to employ 30.

What is important and sufficient to say is this,
that, on an equal extent of surface, small farms, while
they people more densely the rural districts, support,
beyond all others, the greatest number of persons
not engaged in agriculture. Their net produce, from
the time in which it is not less than that of the others,
begins by causing as many of such persons to be fed ;
then the portion of the gross produce, by the aid of
which the superior number of labourers whom they
employ provide for their wants in manufactured
articles, feeds an additional number of the persons
engaged in preparing these articles. This is what
appears, by all the calculations made, to hold good,
with one exception ; but that exception even becomes
corroborative when we take into account the impor-
tations which feed at least a fifth of the population
of England, and which reduces to less than 60 per
square kilometre the number of individuals to whom
27 cultivators furnish the elements of subsistence.

What are the effects produced on all the fractions
of the population by the different modes of rural orga-
nisation ? Is it desirable that farming should only
occupy a very few families, and that other industries
should employ proportionally more ? On this ques-
tion the partisans of great farms have never had a

I 2

102

doubt, nor have they hesitated to assert that the
smaller number of hands which such farms employ
is their principal ground of preference.

Well, this opinion embodies nothing that does not
repose on a false appreciation of facts. If the coun-
t tries the least advanced only display a small degree
of industrial life and activity, it is not, as has been
supposed, because agriculture occupies too many
hands ; but solely because the skill and resources
applicable to other enterprises are there wanting.
What everywhere fixes the number of families
devoted to arts and commerce, is the extent of the
capital which remunerates their labour. Never does
a species of production afford the means of offering
a new wage without a person appearing to receive
and live by it ; this is a result for which the natural
development of populations sufficiently provides, ac-
cording as they advance in wealth and enlightenment.

Further, in order that certain kinds of farms should
arrest or retard the progress of industry, it would be
necessary that they have the effect of reducing the
savings, whose accumulation enlarges and diversifies
the application of labour ; but that is utterly im-
possible. No farmer can obtain or keep a farm
unless on condition of paying the highest rent which
it can yield ; and, on the other hand, no day-labourer
is admitted to work on it, except he can add to the
produce, over and above an equivalent for his wages,
a surplus, under the head of interest and profit, on
the amount of the sums which he receives. Thus,
whatever expenses may be incurred in manual labour,
these are invariably refunded — swelled by a surplus

103

equal to what any other employment of the capital
would give ; and it follows that they contribute, in
the ordinary degree, to the formation of those savings
which a community requires to enable it to strike
out new modes of production.

There is, therefore, seen to be, in the numbers of
the rural classes, nothing which can create an obstacle
to the development of the other classes of society.
Whatever number of hands it may require, agricul-
ture does not withdraw any from manufactures ; the
latter always have as many as they can pay for ; and
so much is this the case that there are countries,
such as England and Holland, where, owing to the
abundance of the accumulated capital, there is found
a greater population than can be fed by that portion
of the crops which is not needed for the use of those
who rear them.

What, then, is the matter before us for examina-
tion ? A single question, and at the bottom a very
simple one, namely, to seej£ societies gain or lose_by
the fact of there being found by theside_of^classefr,
whose numbers arise from^the amountof " "

— • — •

devoted to commercial and

a greater~or~sm allerTuraT£opulatiorK Thus reduced

to its reat~teTms7the solution of the question becomes

easy.

Well, then, all consists in recognising, on the one
hand, if it is advantageous for states to contain in
their bosom populations more or less numerous, and,
on the other, what influence is exercised on the con-
dition of the industrial classes by the presence of

104

different numbers of families employed in agricul-
ture ? Let us direct our attention to the first point

Up to the present time the prosperity of states
has been found connected in the most intimate man-
ner with the degree of density in the populations
which they contain. Not only do the national force
and power increase in proportion to the number of
families assembled on the territory, but also the
activity and social wealth of a country. Unless some
extraordinary concurrence of circumstances happen
to baulk their efforts, men, considered in masses, are
placed on the earth in order to create more elements
of production than they consume 5 and the more
they are crowded together on the soil that carries
them, the more do their labours add to its fertility.
To this truth civilisation, in its whole progress,
renders ample homage. According as the different
countries of the world have become more populous,
new resources have facilitated the enterprises the
most necessary for the common weal — capitals and
trades have multiplied, and wealth and comfort have
kept pace with the numbers of their inhabitants. On
what side soever the increase may have been, in the
rural districts or the towns, in farms or in factories,
the effect, as often as it flowed from natural causes,
has ever been the same — ever salutary and advan-
tageous to all.

There is only one supposable case, where the
existence of a surplus population occasioned by the
small size of farms would be a subject of regret, and
that is, as Arthur Young assumes, when that surplus

105

is necessarily made up of families doomed to igno-
rance and misery. But where are the facts to
support this assumption, in refutation of which could,
at need, be adduced all the observations collected by
economists ? Nowhere does the situation of labourers
depend on their absolute or relative numbers ; in no
place is their lot worse than that of the industrial
classes subsisting like them on wages and the profits
of capital. Betwixt the resources which they enjoy,
and those belonging to the manufacturing classes,
exist proportions, whose maintenance is assured by
the influx of persons into those occupations which
become the most gainful. In agriculture, as in other
professions, masters and day-labourers draw the
returns, which, according to the state of the times,
accrue to all sorts of productions and manual labour ;
and if it happens that, for the most part, the work-
man of the country has somewhat lower wages than
him of the town, it is because the former prefers a
species of employment, whose steadiness preserves
him from those periodical crises when work ceases,
and which produce so much misery.

With regard to the oft reiterated assertion that
large farms contribute, more than small ones, to the
well-being of that part of the population to which
they furnish employment, it is scarcely deserving of
notice. The difference betwixt the two systems is
this — under the one there are few masters and many
labourers ; under the other, more of the former and
fewer of the latter. Now, does not this difference of
itself furnish a reason in favour of small farms ?
While, on the one hand, the partition of the soil

106

among a great number procures for them the solid
advantages of independence — on the other, by afford-
ing the labourers a wider scope in the choice of their
masters, it elevates their social position, and obtains
for them a greater degree of consideration. One
thing at least is certain, that on small farms there
is little difference betwixt the two classes ; the ser-
vants, in place of being treated as mere hirelings,
make, as it were, a part of the family, and are the
fellow-labourers of their masters ; in short, their
mutual relations are such as to obtain for the labourers
better treatment and more security.

The effect of farms which require more manual
labour than others, is therefore confined to adding to
that population which would be found, under any
other rural regime, a surplus whose existence is at-
tended with no peculiar inconvenience. Thence-
forward we have to judge of the consequences of that
surplus merely by the laws applicable to the degree
of density of populations in general, and to consider
it only as a useful addition — as one of those additions
which, in augmenting the number of inhabitants of a
country, at the same time augments its force and
activity.

Let us now inquire what peculiar influence is
exercised over the condition of the population at
large by that increase of the inhabitants which small
farms give rise to in the countries where they prevail.
Few words will be required for disposing of this
question.

Of all the causes of industrial activity, the most
effective are to be found in the extent and steadiness

107

of the markets. The more customers there are to
supply, the more the division of labour permits im-
provements to be made in the processes of fabrica-
tion ; the more rural possessions are multiplied, the
more are the sources enlarged from which the classes
not engaged in agriculture derive the profits which
constitute their prosperity. Now, it is precisely an
extension of the market that accrues to them from
the systems of farming which, realising an equal
amount of net profit as the others, require more
manual labour. The increased population which
small holdings support do not live solely on what the
earth produces, but require houses, furniture, clothes,
tools, and manufactured articles. To these modes of
consumption and demand, a portion of the sums which
they earn is applied ; and, great or small, that portion
coming into the hands of the industrial classes, adds
to those means of livelihood and well-being which
enable them to put forth their energies, and to in-
crease in numbers and prosperity.

It is also proper to take into account the steadiness
of market that results from the nature of the demand
on the part of the rural families. Although capitals
may yield nearly the same amount of profit, all in-
dustries do not assure an equal advantage to those
whose labour they pay for. In this respect every
thing depends on the regularity and steadiness of the
wages which they dispense ; and, speaking with re-
ference to the interests of the operatives engaged in
them, never can the fabrication of the articles de-
signed for a distant foreign market, or for gratifying
the fastidious and capricious tastes of the higher

108

classes at home, prove so advantageous, as that of other
kinds of goods which, prepared for general and com-
mon use, have not to dread a falling off in the sale,
nor the accidents caused by the changes of fashion
and the hazards of speculation. Well, then, it is the
sale of the latter description of merchandise that is
chiefly increased by the consumption of the additional
population which small farms give birth to. The
families, of which this portion of the population is
composed, scarcely require any but the most common
articles, which, being indispensably necessary, com-
mand a constant sale ; and the more numerous such
families are, the more their demands go to swell the
amount of work among the manufacturing operative
classes, and to give it that permanence which ensures
to them a uniform and continuous well-being. Thus
it is that an extended and steady market for goods is
the consequence of the existence of a dense agricul-
tural population. Such advantages are assuredly
sufficiently great to make it impossible to mistake
their importance and reality.

Observe, moreover, with what difficulty England
struggles against the evils incident to such advan-
tages being wanting to her. No country possesses such
vast capitals, and has realised such prodigies of ma-
nufacturing skill — none has opened for herself so
many foreign markets — and still is there none that
endures so frequently such cruel commercial crises.
It is because her markets, too distant to enable her
to forsee the fluctuations of which they are the
theatre, afford a slender compensation for the relative
insignificancy in the number of customers living in

109

the rural districts. In vain do speculators and manu-
facturers proceed upon all the data that experience
offers for their guidance ; unforseen contingencies
blast their plans ; outlets, on which they counted, are
ever and anon shut against their consignments ; a
glut ensues, and the operatives, thrown out of work
till trade revives, are exposed to sufferings, from
which their indefatigable activity entitles them to an
exemption.

England would have been in a different situation
had she drawn her territorial riches from an agricul-
tural system which gave more inhabitants to the
rural districts. Suppose that, in place of her great
farms, which only support on them 29 per cent, of
the population, she had kept up the smaller ones,
which, like those of Alsace and Flanders, would have
employed 11 per cent, more, she would thereby have
been placed out of the reach of the commercial shocks
from which she has suffered so dreadfully. To the
number of inhabitants which she now possesses would
have been added about 2,700,000 country labourers,
whom she wants — that is to say, an additional body
of customers, whose demands, added to those that
support her manufacturing interests, would have ex-
tended and given regularity to the market in such a
way as to ensure to the mass of operatives the best
rewards for their exertions. (Note XXXIX.) Can
any one doubt that in such a situation would have
been found far other and preferable elements of
wealth and power than those which that country now
possesses ?
At the period when the system of large farms be-

110

gan to take root, every thing combined to render it
popular. To her ancient colonies England had just
added many others conquered from their founders ;
and owing to the new markets, of which she thus ac-
quired the exclusive supply, her trade and manufactures
increased with a rapidity till then unknown. Thus
it was that, when sudden modifications in the wants
of the consumers came to change the situation of the
farmers, and to enable the more fortunate of them to
unite advantageously several farms in one, there was
a general approval of such changes, which, in reduc-
ing the number of cultivators, contributed to people
more quickly the factories, whose activity could
scarcely keep pace with the increasing demand for
their goods.

But with all abrupt changes and factitious modes
of prosperity are mixed up certain contingencies,
which sooner or later vitiate the course of them ; and
under its outward advantages the new rural regime
hid at its core the germs of an evil which time did
not fail to disclose and aggravate. At present the
soil does not support a sufficient number of agricul-
tural customers to preserve its manufacturing indus-
try from frequent and fatal irregularities ; and too
often does [it happen that the operative classes have
to pay for the abundance of the day by the privations
of the morrow. With a system of cultivation that
would support more labourers, England would not
have attained to a less degree of prosperity ; but she
would have acquired it divested of the evils which
tarnish its brightness, and leave the masses exposed
to numerous sufferings upon that very soil where are

Ill

collected the most colossal capitals that ever vivified
and remunerated labour.

The explanations which we have just given are suf-
ficient to exhibit in their true light the effects of the
different modes of rural organisation. It has been
shown wherein consists the influence which they ex-
ercise both on the numbers and the composition of
the populations. It is a mistake to assume that the
fewer hands the earth employs, the more are left to
be employed in trade and commerce. It is another
mistake to imagine that the fewer cultivators there
are in a country, manufactures will be the more thriv-
ing. The contrary of all this holds good ; for no-
thing is so conducive to the activity and the well-
being of the non -agricultural classes, as to have at
hand, and on the very soil where they work, a great
number of buyers and users of those products, in the
preparation of which they are engaged. This advan-
tage is so important and obvious that it is surprising
how it should ever have been overlooked. In regard
to the objections resting on the supposition that a
system of farming which requires much manual la-
bour breeds and propagates misery, they are no more
applicable to agricultural than to manufacturing en-
terprises. The masses whose labours give fertility
to the soil are not governed by economical laws pe-
culiar to their class ; their numbers, also, are in pro-
portion to the extent of the resources of which they are
able to dispose ; they do not stand in need of special
aid more than others ; than others they are not more
burdens on society ; and be their numbers what they
may, their existence, far from being a cause of de-

112

pression and disorder to a state, becomes a source of
force and activity.

Moreover, in the difference of the numbers of fami-
lies which they support lies the fact which alone au-
thorises us to pronounce upon the comparative merits
of the several systems of farming. Under all systems,
the yearly wealth derived from the soil may be greatly
increased; and up to this time none of them has, in
this respect, so much surpassed the rest as to give
any person a right to consider it as possessing a clear
superiority in its productive capacity ; but amongst
these systems there are some which, in obtaining as
much net produce, support a greater population than
the rest ; and the countries where this is the case,
are those where the land is most subdivided.

We have now brought to a close researches that
are exempt neither from intricacy nor difficulty. For
the last half century, during which the question re-
lative to great and small farms has been agitated, the
controversies which it excited have all arisen from
contradictory assertions ; still is its solution to be
desired. Other interests than those of a scientific
nature have added to the difficulties connected with
it. In our time, two great principles of a civil order
are struggling for the mastery ; and, up to this hour,
both have borrowed weapons from the differences of
opinion on the subject of rural organisation. En-
gendered by specious appearances, an opinion gained
ground that the dimensions of estates regulated those
of farms ; and the preferences accorded to different
modes of farming corresponded to the predilection
felt for the different systems of territorial distribu-

113

tion. In this way, the partisans of small farms were
also those of the laws that allow and promote the
fractionising of the soil ; while those who were partial
to great farms called for the agglomeration of pro-
perty, and looked on Entails and Primogeniture as
the only means of preventing the sources of social
wealth from being dried up. For the last fifteen
years the discussions on this subject have not made
a great noise in France ; but they have been going
on in the rest of Europe, where their practical influ-
ence has been considerable. The civil inequality
that exists in England has perhaps no stronger sup-
port than the productive superiority generally
ascribed to great farms ; while it is certain that those
governments of Germany, that recently thought it
their duty to restrict the freedom of transmission,
were actuated by a desire to promote the good of
society at large, and agriculture in particular, with-
out having any other object in view.

It is very remarkable that, in spite of the continued
progress of democratical ideas, small farms have as
yet numbered the fewest advocates. Is this fact to
be ascribed to the pre-eminent talents of the persons
who, at the outset of the controversy, appeared as
their adversaries ? This circumstance may have had
its influence ; but, looking at the matter more nar^
rowly, it will be found that other causes have co-
operated with greater force.

Great farms have, above all others, in their exterior
aspect, wherewithal to beget a prejudice in their
favour. Owing to the considerable capitals which
they require, the persons who hold them, rich and

114

well educated, have habits and tastes of a higher order;
and everything connected with theirdomestic arrange-
ments attests a superiority, which is presumed to ex-
tend to their system of farming. And, then, those
immense fields sown entirely with one kind of crop —
those vast inclosures in pasture where a multitude of
animals are fed — that plurality of labourers engaged
on every piece of work — all these appearances are
associated with ideas of order, activity, and abun-
dance, delight the eye of the observer, and cannot fail
to leave a favourable impression.

In regard to writers who have treated of agricul-
ture as a science, they also have, in general, shown
themselves more prepossessed in favour of great than
small farms ; and this preference on their part may
likewise be satisfactorily accounted for. Great farms
possess an advantage which often manifests itself in
the most striking and attractive manner. Of all others
they succeed, in the shortest space of time, in chang-
ing the face of the countries where farming is in a
backward and stationary state ; to such they bring,
what are chiefly wanted, intelligence arid capital, and
thus give birth to the important improvements which
are speedily effected on the soil.

Further, to great farms have also been owing the
greater part of the changes, of which the centre and
the west of Europe have been the seats. What led
to their accomplishment was the displacing of small
tenants by farmers who, possessed of the capital re-
quisite for working their farms properly, extended
their dimensions and increased their produce. This
fact had already attracted attention when the changes

115

effected in England came to strengthen the impres-
sions which it had made. People did not inquire if
general causes had produced the striking and rapid
increase in the territorial production of England. The
enlargement of farms and vast improvements on
the soil having gone hand in hand, this fact had a
decided influence ; and great farms came finally to be
considered as the best.

Corn and bestial were, besides, almost the only
products which, up to our time, constituted the agri-
cultural wealth of a country ; and these were reared
on great farms in abundance, and without difficulty.
To show that other kinds of produce existed, it was
requisite that the progress of wealth and comfort
should breed a demand for a greater variety of
articles more difficult to rear ; and that same progress,
which alone could assure the prosperity of small farms,
was not merely very tardy in the north of Europe,
but only made itself in any degree felt in a certain
number of countries.

In these ways, the preference given to large farms
is explained. It was in vain that small farmers drew
an equal or superior surplus, and that the high rate of
their rents proved their ability to derive every possi-
ble advantage from their farms — opinion had taken
its direction, and time has not yet succeeded in bring-
ing it back within the limits of truth.

For our part, free from all theoretical preposses-
sions, we have had recourse to facts for our premises ;
and from these alone have we drawn the conclusions
to which we have come.

Touching the question in hand, all turns sub-

116

stantially on the elucidation of two principal facts,
namely, what is the specific power of the different
modes of farming? what influence do they exercise
on the State, and on the energy and well being of
the population ? Now, as to the first, our researches
have shown that, in the present state of information
and of farming as it is practised, it is small farms
that, after defraying the expenses of production,
realise the greatest quantity of net produce. In
regard to the second, it is small farms which, in giving
a denser population to the country districts, not only
add more to that strength which the State derives
from the density of its inhabitants, but enlarge that
steady market for manufactured articles, the prepara-
tion and exchange of which give a stimulus to manu-
facturing industry. Such conclusions, although at
variance with generally received opinions, are never-
theless the results of observations of incontestible
accuracy, and are the only ones that are in harmony
with existing facts.

Here we may be asked, if facts will always remain
the same as at present ? Small farms, which have in
all times prevailed in the south of Europe, but which
elsewhere have only succeeded in taking root slowly
and in certain districts, will they continue to gain
ground and become general ? Will not new modi-
fications in the wants of the consumers, and in the
processes of labour, give to other forms of manage-
ment the superiority that small farms now enjoy ?
Such questions are not capable of being replied to
with absolute certainty ; but still are there grounds on
which we feel authorised to emit an opinion as to them.

117

Whatever transformations may be occasioned by
the progressive movement of society, in all countries
of some extent, different modes of labour will con-
tinue to exist. Never will local circumstances lose
their natural influence ; and the quality of the dif-
ferent portions of the territory, in drawing towards
them particular kinds of products, will in all cases
determine the distribution of the soil, and the size of
farms. But still the causes to which the increased
number of small farms is at present owing will not
cease to operate, and time will only give new force to
them.

In fact, populations will continue to augment in
numbers and comfort ; and the gradual rise in the
price of food, by multiplying more and more the em-
ployment of manual labour, will necessarily favour
the modes of farming the best adapted to the concen-
tration of labour.

On the other hand, with the progressive diffusion
of well-being will arise an increased demand for
those products which small farms are alone suited for
rearing. There will thus be created for such farms
fresh sources of profit, and new inducements to mul-
tiply them.

Besides, let any one observe the changes effected
on all the points where the most prosperous part of
the population is concentrated, and he will be enabled
to judge of those which will be accomplished in the
future. Great farms have retired from the vicinity
of towns, and have been succeeded by others more
suited for satisfying the various and refined wants
which the progress of wealth and comfort give birth

118

to. Here, then, do we behold an effect which will
diffuse itself more extensively in proportion as
civilisation advances. To the articles of consump-
tion presently in use will be joined others still more
delicate in their quality ; and numbers of farms will
gradually assume that mixed character, in regard to
produce, which they do not yet possess.

Such are the innovations which, according to all
the data furnished by the experience of the past, will
take place in the rural constitution of the countries
whose prosperity is on the increase. In every case
it is important that the transformations, whatever
direction they may take, meet with no obstacle or
impediments. It is the very advance of civilisation
which determines them ; and they never take place
unless under the impulse of wants and demands to
satisfy which is to promote the real interests of
•ociety.

SUPPLEMENT.

ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF LANDED PROPERTY, AND THE PRO-
GRESS OP ITS SUBDIVISION IN FRANCE.

It is now more than half a century since landed
property in France acquired a free circulation, dis-
tribution, and partition. This lapse of time having
given to the new laws ample scope for their opera-
tion, it becomes important to establish the changes
which have been accomplished under their influence.

The laws which regulate the transfer of the soil
have always been regarded as exercising much influ-
ence on the state and distribution of farms ; and
thence have arisen the strong apprehensions which
the abolition of primogeniture and entails has excited
amongst us. In the opinion of persons not actuated
by narrow political prejudices, the establishment of
the common law in the matter of inheritances, and
the free access to the advantages of real property
accorded to all, embodies a principle pregnant with
decay and ruin ; partitions continued from generation

120

to generation must necessarily produce the decompo-
'V sition of the original farms, and reduce them to par-
cels too inconsiderable to admit of an energetic and
remunerative mode of farming ; and the time (said
they) would come when the whole soil of the country
would be composed of small fields scarcely capable
of supporting the swarms of families into whose
hands they had fallen. There would then remain no
surplus for the supply of the urban and manufactur-
ing classes. Deprived of the means of exchanging
their productions for the articles necessary for their
subsistence, the towns would become depopulated ;
with the latter would disappear the arts, literature,
science, and industry — an equality of ignorance and
misery would gradually become the prevailing con-
dition of all, and France would finally descend to the
lowest stage of weakness and debasement.

Such fears, so clamorously expressed, ought, never-
theless, to have been allayed by the consideration
that France, in adopting the law of equal division in
landed successions, and in giving all free access to
the soil, had not launched into a career that wanted
experience for its guide. The system which she
adopted was not one of the innovations of which the
world had not previously furnished examples.

The Republics of Italy, in the times of their great-
est splendour, the greater part of the Provinces of
Holland, and the Cantons of Switzerland, had been
ruled by the law of equal division, and in none of
these states was there ever witnessed the smallest
portion of the evils which were asserted to be inse-
parable from such an ordeal. Far from its being so,

121

these countries arrived at a high degree of prosperity,
and their agriculture especially was remarkable for its
productiveness. But men once prepossessed did not
look at the subject so closely, and seemed to prefer
resting their predictions on visionary and fantastic
assumptions.

At the present day, however, the process of demon-
stration must be held as far advanced. To twenty-
five years of war has succeeded a still longer period
of peace ; facts have followed their course in the
midst of the most opposite influences, and it is as-
suredly impossible to mistake the vast amount of
progress that has been realised. Industry, wealth,
intelligence — all that composes the greatness and the
power of nations — has been increased amongst us with
a rapidity to which no former period furnishes a pa-
rallel. The populations of the towns have been seen
to increase in a proportion much greater than pre-
viously ; never before did manufactures give employ-
ment to so many hands ; in all ranks are seen in-
creased activity and well-being; and such has been
the gradual accumulation of savings, that enterprises
of an unheard-of magnitude have been multiplied and
accomplished with a wonderful facility. Such bene-
ficial and extensive changes would assuredly not have
been effected if agriculture had found in the institu-
tions, not to say a cause of obstruction, but merely
some obstacles to its free expansion. Agriculture is
the primary source, the fundamental principle, of all
national prosperity ; there is no country that ad-
vances and flourishes when it languishes and remains
stationary ; no nation can become great, in point of

L

122

numbers and comfort, if the crops on which it sub-
sists do not become at one and the same time abun-
dant and rich.

But, however undoubted the progress of France
may be, it is not the less desirable that the real effects
of the system under which she has existed for the last
fifty years should be appreciated and fixed. If the
exaggerated and idiotic assertions we have alluded to
are now confined to a very small number of partisans,
there is an opinion still prevalent that a system which
allows the soil to be divided according to the fortui-
tous composition of families, and the fluctuating com-
binations of individual interests, necessarily leads to
abuse in subdivisions. It has been generally as-
sumed that the number of proprietors and parcels
augments with an increasing rapidity, and that, in
process of time, the whole soil will become subdivided
into fields of so diminutive an order as to lessen the
produce. Let us, therefore, inquire to what extent,
if any, this opinion is well founded. Official docu-
ments of an incontestible accuracy contain, on this
point, information of which we shall avail ourselves ;
and it may be that we will succeed in showing de-
monstratively what the real course of facts has been.

It is to be regretted that there are no means of
knowing the exact number of the owners of the soil ;
but, in the absence of such information, we know that
of the properties — that is to say, the number of proper-
ties inscribed in the lists in the name of the same per-
son in each of the districts designed for the collection
of the Land Tax — As many of the taxpayers have
lands and houses in different parts of the country as

123

there are even properties, portions of which extend
into several districts, the number of properties is
much greater than that of proprietors ; but this fact
cannot invalidate the accuracy of the conclusions to
be drawn from the variations which are seen in the
arithmetical figures. Betwixt the cipher of properties
and that of proprietors there exist relations that can-
not differ in any great degree, and it is impossible
for one of them to rise or fall in amount without the
other experiencing the like change.

Observe, then, what have been, since 1815, the in-
creasing ciphers of landed properties and the popula-
tion : —

Years.

Number of
Properties as
Taxed.

Population.

1815
1826
1835
1842

10,083,751
10/296,693
10,893,528
11,511,841

29,152,743
31,851,545
33,329,573
34,376,722

These ciphers show an increase of 14? per cent, in
the number of properties during the twenty-seven years
that separate 1815 from 1842. This is a yearly ad-
dition of scarcely more than one-half per cent. —
an addition that would be unworthy of notice in case
the population had, on its side, received no augmen-
tation. But the case is otherwise ; — the population
during the same period has increased about 18 per
cent — and it follows that, instead of having multiplied
beyond measure, the number of proprietors has not
even followed the general movement of the popula-
tion, and was, relatively to the total mass of inhabi-

124

tants in France, a little less in 1842 than it was in
1815.

[The author here proceeds to show that the increase in
the number of properties that has taken place since 1815,
is more apparent than real, by reason of the greater num-
ber of houses and other buildings having no land attached
that have been erected during that period, and which are
not separately set down in the tax-lists. In order to form
a probable estimate of the number of such houses and
buildings, he enters into elaborate statements and calcu-
lations extending to great length, which are omitted in the
Translation. He then resumes as follows.]

To these considerations, which prove how slight
has been the change that has taken place amongst us
in the distribution of property strictly territorial, are
joined others obtained from documents altogether
new, which corroborate them in the most striking
manner.

The cadastre, or state valuation of property, has
been recommenced in a part of the cantons in which
it had been made in 1809 and 1810. This new
operation has been completed in 37 cantons belong-
ing to 14 departments it is nearly so in other 21 of
18 departments, and in 69 communes of the arron-
dissements of Sceaux and St. Denis ; and the data
furnished in these two periods, placed in contrast,
afford information the more conclusive that the places
to which they relate are situated in districts of France
the most different from each other. We shall give
the tables of them, beginning with that of the cantons
where the changes that have ensued in the number of
parcels, as well as in that of proprietors, are now
known and proved.

125

CANTONS RECADASTRED FROM 1840 TO 1845.

Departments.

Cantons.

First Cadastre.

Second Cadasfre.

Number
of
Properties
as taxed.

Number
of
Parcels.

Number
of
Properties
as tax-d.

Number
of
Parcels.

A.in

5,983
3,644
2,952
4,959
4,224
7,627
4,097
3,400
6,951
3,597
4,126
3,575
3,804
3,007
1,838
3,647
2,750
3,185
3,775
3,297
5,069
3,145
6,200
1,085
5,396
859
3,343
3,478
2,525
1,611
2,992
8,003
5,012
5,368
4,053
8,953
6,934

76,791
40,864
39,139
75,254
49,585
85,866
37,838
39,482
24,777
34,120
39,543
27,147
36,987
33,052
22,229
31,455
26,188
24,590
51,278
44,447
23,235
27,946
83,954
16,778
49,071
16,924
36,357
35,264
25,373
9,122
33,543
111,298
65,525
49,584
63,555
66,685
49,830

5,651
3,690
3,195
5,280
4,799
8,201
5,497
4,885
3,281
3,898
4,565
3,939
6,229
3,239
1,821
3,455
2,327
3,223
3,451
3,361
6,381
3,890
6,672
1,425
6,476
1,117
3,755
4,309
3,165
1,411
3,195
8,396
5,502
5,062
4,353
8,730
5,391

79,569
41,287
36,829
60,483
38,851
86,648
41,276
49,659
31,453
41,150
42,773
28,523
49,867
39,683
26,161
32,385
24,741
24,979
50,560
44,948
31,439
32,958
84,752
21,015
54,423
20,322
40,694
41,689
28,921
11,774
33,857
12,957
159,615
48,867
74,610
75,235
54,168

Ardennes

C6te-d'0r....
C6te-du-Nord

\le*zieres

Sedan (Sud)

Novion

Mon toon tour

Dinan (Quest). ..

Danville

jrirondc... ••

Evreux (Nurd)

U Ian quo tort «.

L,andes
liot & Garrone

Morbihan....
Nord

Grenade

Le Mas-d'Agenois
Villereal

Vannes (Est)

Saone & Loire

Sarthe.... ....
Seine & Marne

LUTIV

Cluny •• .. .

St. Leger, St. Beuvray

LouluiMS..

Le Mans (2d Canton)...
Brie

Couloinmiers

Claye

Bourbon Vendee
Fontenay

St. Hilaire 1'Antize
Total

154,266

1,874,075

163,277

1,688,916

L 2

126

Let us now look at the Table of those cantons re-
cadastred, where the new valuation has as yet only
made known the changes in the parcels.

CANTONS RECADASTRED,
where the number of Parcels is only yet made known.

Departments

Cantons.

First
Cadastre.

Second
Cadastre.

Number of
Parcels.

Number of
Parcels.

Aisne
Ardennes
Ariege."

Laon

77,397
45,462
49,382
71,031
92,570
58,602
47,653
45,106
14,194
24,025
25,167
24,424
25,945
30,950
19,601
17,992
34,444
104,319
65,133
55,071
75,192

164,674
173,544

78,419
39,800
50,402
79.013
110,800
54,332
54,356
39,338
15,320
21,840
26,469
29,676
26,227
37,607
20,760
22,033
43,145
85,790
64,794
54,517
82,452

145,729
148,290

Varilhes

St. Amand de Boisse

C6te-du-Nord ...
Hreuse

Ahun

Evreux (Sud)
Concarneau ...

Gers

Pessac

Ille&Villaine...

Montfort

Le'vroux

Landes

Pyrenees (Basse)
Surthc

St. Sever
Claraco

Le Mans (1st Canton)
Le Mans (3d Canton)

Seine & Marne
Vendee

Le Chatelet

Vosesres

Seine

Arrondissement of St.
Denis, 30 communes
Arrondissement of
Sceaux, 39 communes

Total

1,341,881

1,331,109

These tables merit the more attention, inasmuch
as the facts which they exhibit are not only of un-

127

questionable accuracy, but may be considered as
presenting a sufficiently faithful average specimen
of those which, during the last thirty years, have
taken place in the rest of France. The cantons
recently cadastred belong to districts the most diffe-
rent and dissimilar from each other in point of soil ;
their surface embraces about 1,800,000 hectares ;
they contain nearly a million of inhabitants ; in their
circle are found none of the great cities, whose
population has increased so immensely since 1810;
they are cantons chiefly rural, and therefore furnish the
most accurate and decisive evidence of the subdivisions
and changes which property in land has undergone.

Now, what do these changes amount to ? First,
37 cantons, in which the cadastral operations have
been completed, contain, at the present time, 163,277
proprietors. Of these there were, in 1810, 154,216,
being a numerical increase of 5.7 per cent. As the
total mass of inhabitants increased nearly 19 per
cent., it follows that, instead of multiplying inordi-
nately, the class of proprietors has been relatively
a little diminished, and forms, at the present time, the
smallest part of the total population.

Moreover, there are, at present, in the cantons
placed in the first table, 120,000 souls more than
there were in 1809 and 1810 ; and this augmentation
of the population, necessitating the erection of at
least 22,000 houses, has certainly led to the creation
of several thousands of new properties, and so
entitles us to conclude that property, strictly territo-
rial, is not now divided amongst a greater number of
owners than it was thirty-two years ago..

128

It is also proper to observe that, since 1810, lands
belonging to the state and to the communes, have in
some cases been sold, and in others divided, and have
furnished new elements for the formation of properties.
Some of these are contained in the cantons re-
cadastred, and these mutations have not been without
influence in producing the slight augmentation ob-
servable in the present number of proprietors.

In regard to the parcels, their number has followed
the same progression as the properties. In 1809
and 1810 they were found to be 1,594,874 ; they are
now 1,688,916, which is only 5.9 per cent, more;
thus affording a fresh proof of the fact that, in spite
of the changes it has experienced, territorial property
exists under forms that have been changed only in a
very slight degree.

The second table does not present the ancient and
present state of the properties. That of its parcels
is there given for 21 cantons belonging to 28 different
departments, as well as 69 of the 80 rural communes
of the department of the Seine. The general cipher
has not risen- — instead of 1,341,817 parcels, which
existed before 1811, there are now 1,331,109 ; and it
is, at the least, probable that a similar diminution has
taken place in the number of properties, and in that
of the proprietors.

Considered in detail, these facts are not less in-
structive. It is not at an equal rate that the pro-
perties and parcels have multiplied on different points
of the territory. Far from that being the case, 10
cantons in 37 have fewer proprietors than in 1809,
12 have more, and in 15 others scarcely has there

129

been any appreciable change. It has been the
same as to the parcels ; sometimes their cipher has
been reduced, at other times augmented, and what is
still more worthy of notice is, that there are cantons
where no accord is found betwixt their numerical
variations and the changes taken place in the number
of properties taxed.

Such facts, whose accuracy cannot be called in
question, throw all the light that can be wished for
on the real progress of the transformations which
territorial property has undergone amongst us. Not-
withstanding of the removal of all obstacles which, in
former times, preserved entire and concentrated estates
— although successions have been subjected to nume-
rous divisions, and although the right on the part of
all to acquire and sell land has remained unlimited,
none of the apprehensions which the successive sub-
divisions of the soil excited have been realised ; and,
far from having been augmented beyond measure,
the number of properties has not increased in the
proportion which the natural development of the
population seemed to require.

This is because the common law in regard to pro-
perty in land is sufficient for all the exigencies of
social prosperity. The common law is justice in the
relations of men, whether with each other or with
things ; and justice freely and fearlessly applied never
leads to other results than what are conducive to the
general well-being. The desire of obtaining the
advantages of property is doubtless strong among
the rural classes ; but that desire is not the blind
unreflecting passion it has been supposed to be ; and

130

with it are naturally formed habits of forethought and
economy, which end by enlightening and confining
it within due bounds. The land, whatever charm
the ownership of it may have, does not the less
preserve its predominant character. The source of
income, its value depends on the greater or less
quantity of fruits which those who cultivate it can
extract from it. To augment or multiply these
fruits — such is the object at which its owners con-
stantly aim ; and that object all are aware they can
only attain by constantly striving to appropriate
and adapt their lots to the requirements of the vo-
cation which they follow. This is what in France
has imparted so much diversity to the changes which,
on different points of the territory, the partition of
the soil has undergone. It is the species of labour
even, to which local circumstances assure the pre-
ference, which sometimes accelerates the progress
of subdivision, and at other times checks it and leads
to concentration. Time will only confirm and extend
results which, in spite of their apparent opposition,
have equally a tendency to place property in more
intimate harmony with the changing and various
exigencies of cultivation, for the more enlightened
a nation becomes, the more diffused becomes the in-
telligence by the aid of which it learns to draw the
greatest possible advantage from the capital at its
disposal.

NOTES BY THE AUTHOR.

NOTE I.

This is what is affirmed by Segrand d'Aussy in his
" History of the Private Life of the French," vol. i. p. 33.
Two years after the publication of " The Friend of Man,"
the first agricultural society which existed in France was
founded in Brittany. That of Paris, established by a
decreet of council, dates no farther back than 1st February
1761. At the same period also appeared the first Nos. of
the " Economic Journal."

NOTE II.

"The Friend of Man," vol. i., chap, v., p. 80, 4th edit.
The declamatory style of the Marquis de Mirabeau adds
to the confusion arising from the mixing up of his reminis-
cences as a person of high birth, with the principles of the
physiocratic school, of which he was one of the most
zealous adepts. Hence Arthur Young was led to point out
the marked difference betwixt his opinions and those of
his son, the celebrated Mirabeau, who, in his work on
the Prussian Monarchy, avowed himself the advocate of
small farms. Arthur Young was mistaken on this point.
The Marquis de Mirabeau denounced equally gYeat estates
and great farms. "What he chiefly extolled and wished to
realise was a country divided into small heritages, all cul-
tivated by the hands of the proprietors.

NOTE III.

" The Inutility of Fallows shown by Experience, espe-
cially by the Farming in the Districts of Wals and Ter-
monde." This very curious tract, by M. de Bertin, a
Belgian writer, appeared in the Acts of the Imperial and
Royal Academy of Brussels for 1792— vol. 6.

132

NOTE IV.

Bell, a Scotch surgeon, like the rest of his countrymen, be-
lieved in the superiority of large farms, and looked on
those of 600 acres, or 250 hectares, as the best ; but he, at
sametime, admitted that circumstances, varying with the
countries, must decide the question, and even thought that
the nearer the cultivation of a farm approaches to that of a
garden, the more prodactive it becomes.

The opponents of middle-sized farms have been, and are
still, numerous. The objections which they take to farms
too small to occupy a plough, may be seen stated in a
notice inserted, in 1824, in the " Journal of Agriculture" of
the Low Countries, under the title of " Notice as to the
Effects of the Division of Properties and Lands on Agri-
culture."

NOTE V.

In that controversy the agricultural writers were divided
in opinion, and were thrown into the shade by party writers.
Still, while some, like M. Toxier, called for farms of 350
arpents, others, like M. Adrien de Gasparin, ably defended
the cause of small properties.

NOTE VI.

The unanimity of English economists on this question
astonished * Madame de Stael, who observed that their
notions on property and farming were perverted. On this
head see "Malthus's Principles of Political Economy," and
his articles in the " Edinburgh Review ;" as also an article
in that periodical by the celebrated M'Culloch, published
in 1823, under the title of " French Law of Succession."

NOTE VII.

Simond, a writer of travels of much merit, is author of
the article published in 1820, under the title "France."
As to Sir Francis d'lvernois, his writings are numerous, and

133

the last appeared in 1826, entitled, "Materials for Aiding
the Inquiry as to the Effects of the breaking down of
Landed Property in France."

NOTE VIII.

It was the Duke de Levis who, in 1820, attacked the
breaking down of estates, and, in order to check it, pro-
posed the creation of electoral domains indivisible, and
transmissible in the order of primogeniture. M. Benoit did
not go so far in the Chamber of Deputies. His speech was
little more than an exposition of the motives of the laws
presented the year following by the government.

NOTE IX.

See, in the works of Count Hertzberg, a Dissertation
read before the Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres of
Berlin, 27th January 1785, " On Population in general, and
on that of the States of Prussia in particular.*'

NOTE X.

(Erblicht Colontraht.) This opinion is ancient. See in the
" Exposition of the Public Law of Germany," p. 313, a de-
tail of the classifications established among the peasants.
Wurtemburg especially had a great number of tenants with
perpetual leases, and of small proprietors. It was Austria
that, after the expulsion of the Duke of Ulrich, had, with
the view of attaching the people to her, shown most favour
to the peasantry. At a later period the devastations of the
thirty years' war made it necessary to seek the means of
repeopling the districts that had been abandoned ; and
none better were found than by dividing the land among
enfranchised peasants, with hereditary rights.

NOTE XI.

Denmark, in particular, had done all in her power to ac-
complish this end. After having extended to two lives, or

134

fifty years, the leases held by the peasants on the domains
of the nobility in Jutland and its islands, it encouraged the
latter to alienate to the former, in perpetuity, the holdings
called Boendergods, at times extending to seven-eighths of
the surface ; and to facilitate these sales, it advanced, in the
way of loan to the purchasers, two-thirds of the prices, at
6 per cent., to be applied as well to the payment of the in-
terest as to the extinction of the capital lent.

NOTE XII.

In Bavaria, the breaking down of pieces of land, the tax
on which does not exceed 45 kreutzers, is now prohibited.
In the Duchy of Nassau, the same prohibition applies to
arable land whose contents are less than 50 verges, and to
meadows under 25.

NOTE XIII.

Latifunda perdidere Italiam et jam vero provincias. — Lib.
XVIII, c. 6.

NOTE XIV.

In Denmark, in 1776, the portion of the domain which the
Seigneur reserved for himself only formed in some localities
an eighth of the total contents ; in others, it extended to a
third.

The edict issued by Maria Theresa, for the benefit of the
serfs of Hungary, explains sufficiently how the transition
was effected in Denmark and the north of Germany. Ac-
cording to this edict, the Hungarian Seigneurs were to put
each of their peasants in possession of a field called a
" sitting," and, in return, the latter was to furnish to his
master 104 days' labour annually. Besides, for each " sitting"
there were to be furnished yearly 4 hens, a dozen of eggs,
a pound and a half of butter, the thirtieth-part of a calf, the
spinning of six pounds of wool or flax, a florin in cash, the
cutting or carriage of a load of wood. The sittings were ap-
pointed to be from 12 to 15 hectares each in size.

135

In ancient Poland, the dues of the Seigneur were as high
as three days' work per week. In Russia, an Ukase of the
Emperor Alexander fixed the number in Livonia at two
days a- week, or 104 yearly.

NOTE XV.

In the course of this movement it was the implements of
husbandry and the bestial for service which first became
the property of the cultivators. The other bestial and
sheep were, for a long time, the joint property of the land-
lord and tenant. Such was the state of things in 1790 in
the district of Chatellerault, and there are even now some
parts of France in this backward state.— See the " Topo-
graphical Description of the District of Chatellerault," by
Creuze de Latouche, p. 39.

NOTE XVI.

The immense farms of the nobility, in spite of the intel-
ligence and energy of their proprietors, are not productive.
The want of capital and hands checks or prevents the most
of the improvements of which they are susceptible. The
estates are also, in general, loaded with debts. In 1826,
out of 262 seignorial domains included in the Landchat, 195
were indebted to the Bank for Hypothecs. See " Jacob's
Report on the State of Agriculture in the North of Europe,"
p. 43.

NOTE XVII.

On this subject, Mr Porter thus expresses himself—
" The opinion relative to the alteration which the system
£f farming has undergone by the increasing practice of ap-
plying light soils to uses for which strong lands were for-
merly believed only to be fit, is confirmed by communica-
tions made to the Poor Law Commissioners in Worcester-
shire, and printed in the Appendix (p. 419) to their report.
According to the reports of rents in past times, and other
documents, we find that while stiff lands are stationary, or

136

rather decline in value, those called poor, owing to the
better system of cropping now in use, have risen considera-
bly. I may say that, on an average, where stiff lands yield
a rent of from 22 to 25 schs., light lands bring from 30 to
35schs.; and what has brought the latter into favour is,
that they require fewer horses, and these of inferior strength,
with less manual labour, to keep them in good order, and
the ease with which they can be laboured in all states of
the weather ensures more regular returns." — Progress of
the Nation, vol. i. pp. 165 to 166.

These reasons of preference, which suffice for England,
are not the only ones that operate in France, where what
has chiefly tended to recommend light or poor soils is the
great diversity in the produce that can be obtained from
them.

NOTE XVIII.

The following are the progressive rates of rent in several
of the communes of the departments of the Eure and
the Oise, according to the classification of lands in the
Cadastre at certain periods, of which the farthest back
does not exceed 28 years : —

Average Rent of a Hectare by Classes.
According to the Cadastre— 1st class, 58f. ; 2d, 48f. ; 3d,

34f. ; 4th, 20f. ; 5th, 8f.

As let at present— 1st class, 80f. ; 2d, 70f. ; 3d, 60f. ; 4th,
60f. ; 5th, 40f.

From this we see how much the differences have di-
minished in the course of a very short time. It is 32 per
cent, comparatively to the Cadastral valuations that the
net rent of the lands of the first class have risen; it is
from 250 to 600 per cent, that the net rent of those of the
4th and 5th classes have advanced. But this upward move-
ment still goes on ; and we know communes, wherein the
lands designed forty years ago as the most productive, are
no longer those that yield the highest rents. In the richest
and best cultivated departments, the distinction betwixt

137

lands of the three first classes no longer corresponds with
their present condition — and there sandy lauds, recently
brought in, which small farmers have, in the course of a
few years, changed into excellent soils, yield an ever in-
creasing rent.

NOTE XIX.

The net profit cannot any more serve as a guide, because
the lands in the rudest state may, by the application of
capital, be made to yield more than the most fertile gardens.
— Travels in France, vol. iii., Size of Farms.

NOTE XX.

In England, as the reports of the Parliamentary Commis-
sioners attest, it is at 10 per cent, that the profit must be
stated which ought to be obtained by the farmers on the
capital employed. But it is also considered that to carry on
a farm properly, a farmer ought to bring to it a capital of
ten times the amount of the rent. In taking off 10 per
cent, reserved for the farmer, and 5 per cent, as interest,
it would follow that he would have the other 5 per cent,
as net profit. This would be a part of the net produce
equal to the half of that which the proprietor receives as
rent. In France certain inquiries lead us to think, that in
many of the departments such is also the portion of the
net produce which the farmers reserve to themselves.

NOTE XXI.

The counties of Northumberland and Lincoln are those
where the land is let at the highest rate ; and Porter ob-
serves that, if the whole country yielded the same rents,
agricultural wealth would rise to double what it is at pre-
sent. It is observed that the northern counties yield the
highest rents ; and everything goes to show that this must
be attributed principally to the abundance and excellence
of their pastures. The valley-farms are there let at very

M2

138

high rents. Here we have only given the average rates ;
taking England as a whole, the rate does not exceed 20 sclis.
per acre, or 62 fr. per hectare.

NOTE XXII.

We only give the average rates ; the rents of large farms
in that part of France vary from 60 to 90 fr.

NOTE XXIII.

We give this cipher on the authority of M. Lullin de Cha-
teauvieux. It is perhaps too high, but we must bear in
mind that, in Lombardy, there are very deep soils, and of
amazing fertility.

NOTE XXIV.

This cipher is rather above than below the reality, and
has been taken at a date already ancient, since which rents
appear to have risen in certain places.

NOTE XXV.

We have only to take the ciphers applicable to England.
Those which, in France, apply to great farms are much
lower, and nowhere besides do farms possessing such ex-
tensive bounds exist in sufficient numbers, so as to present
one of those vast agricultural categories that are met with
in England.

' NOTE XXVI.

The total charges which, in England, Scotland, and Ire- ••
land, weigh on landed property, including houses, are esti-
mated at 408,000,000 of francs. In this sum the tithes enter
for 100, and the land-tax for 29, millions ; but what part of
these burdens is borne by England alone, and by each of
the counties which furnish the rate of rents, there exist no
documents to show.

139

NOTE XXVII.

Sixty schs. a quarter, or 28 fr. the hectolitre, are set down
as the remunerating price of wheat in England. During the
last ten years, the course of the market being subject to
great variations, has exceeded that sum ; and 25 fr. at pre-
sent seems to be about the average price.

NOTE XXVIII.

" General Report of the Agricultural State and Political
Condition of Scotland," by Sir J. Sinclair — vol. i., p. 198.

NOTE XXIX.

See, in the "Report on French Agriculture," by the
inspectors of agriculture in the departments of the north,
some remarks on the state of property and farms. The
writer is neither a partisan of small farms, nor of locations
in detail, which he supposes must, in the long run, exhaust
the land ; but the facts which he cites show in how great a
degree small farms rise in favour, and how they displace
great farms as often as the current leases fall in.

NOTE XXX.

We are well entitled to set down at 75 fr. per hectare the
average or medium rent of the whole of that part of France
which, computing the corn at 15 fr. the hectolitre, supposes
that the share thereof falling to the landlord gives him 415
litres per hectare. But, in pitching it at 90 fr. the hectare
—and that is taking a high cipher — the average rents in the
north of England, and supposing, in order to compensate
the less difference in the price of fodder, the value of corn
in England to be only 22 fr., we would have, as the land-
lord's portion, or the rent, not more than 409 litres.

NOTE XXXI.

In England, the hundredth part of the arable land is not
devoted to the growing of the nicer products of the soil,

140

which require much care and labour to rear. It is Ireland
and Scotland which furnish it with flax, hemps, dye-stuffs,
and roots, as well as poultry, which it likewise receives
from the nearest parts of the Continent. In France and
Belgium, the finer products referred to are found to occupy
a great space, according as their departments are more
populous and thriving. They occupy a thirteenth part of
the territory in the region of the north of France, which we
have cited, and a seventeenth in one department of the
north taken by itself. In regard to the products of the
dairy and poultry -yard, which the great farmers of England
cannot give attention to, they make a considerable figure in
the returns of small farms. In the departments of the north,
veal, eggs, and poultry sometimes bring in 1000 fr. a year
to a small farmer — which, after deducting the attendant
costs, is equal to an addition to the gross produce of from
15 to 20 fr. per hectare. On this subject reference is made
to the Memoir of M. Cordier, " On the Agriculture of French
Flanders."

NOTE XXXII.

This is agreeable to the statistical documents published
by the Minister of the Interior in his third official series.
In this description of estimates, the number of bestial must
be computed by the extent of the surface under cultivation,
seeing that it is the latter whose fertility they keep up.

NOTE XXXIII.

According to the Statistical State of France, published by
the Minister of Commerce — title, " Agriculture," vol. i.

NOTE XXXIV.

It is scarcely necessary to repeat that wages, in whatever
shape they are paid, are actually composed of a portion of
the products which those who draw them assist in creating.
The farmer only pays his labourers in money by selling the
grain which he reaps, and this grain reaches the rest of the

141

population equally well as if the labourer had been settled
with in produce, and had himself exchanged it for the
money which he required to purchase the articles he stood
in want of.

NOTE XXXV.

It is very difficult to obtain entirely correct information
on this point. First, there are districts where the exporta-
tion and importation of food are considerable enough to
have an influence on the numbers of the industrial popula-
tion ; secondly, there are others where a good many field-
labourers also employ themselves in manufactures, and
where it is, consequently, difficult to classify the operatives.
We must, therefore, rest satisfied with the statistics that
make an approach to correctness ; at same time, we consider
those of which we have made use as presenting contrasts
sufficiently marked to enable us, on the whole, to come to
correct conclusions.

NOTE XXXVI.

The average annual importation of grain into England
amounts to 5,000,000 of hectolitres from Ireland, and
1,100,000 from other countries ; besides, Scotland and Ireland
furnish her with great numbers of cattle for the butcher,
and she draws from the Continent considerable quantities
of vegetables, butter, cheese, eggs, and poultry. We are
thus authorised to estimate that part of the alimentary sub-
stances used in England, coming from other countries, at a
fifteenth part of the total consumption.

After deducting the seed, there remains to England a raw
disposable produce of about three milliards of francs ; and as
the amount of land-rents annually is little more than
700,000,000, it may not be uninteresting to show by what
ways the means of subsistence are provided for so many per-
sons having no connexion with agriculture. Our figures,
however, must be taken as only approximating to the truth.

142

Raw produce remaining to be divided after deducting the
seed 3,000,000,000

Portion of it which falls to the non-agricultural
classes —

Amount of rent 700,000,000

Tithes and taxes paid directly
by the farmer 210,000,000

Expenses oftheagricultural classes—

Share of indirect taxes falling on
articles consumed by them.... 300,000,000

Cost of keeping farm implements
in repair 150,000,000

Expenses of farmers in their fa-
milies— these expenses being
defrayed out of the amount of
interest and profits, which they
draw at the rate of ten per
cent., at least, on a capital of
about six milliards and a half, 340,000,000

Expenses of farm and domestic
servants, exclusive of those of
food, calculated at a little
more than a third of their
wages 320,000,000

Total value of the means of sub-
sistence falling to the mercan-
tile and manufacturing classes, 2,020,000,000

NOTE XXXVII.

It is impossible to guarantee the perfect accuracy of these
different figures. Those of them that have reference to
Italy seem to come nearest the truth, inasmuch as they are
in conformity to the proportions in which the crop is divided
betwixt the proprietors and metayers. In regard to Bel«
gium, recent researches have rated the population of the
two Flanders at sixty per cent, of the aggregate amount.
But it is essential to keep in view, that nowhere are found
so many cultivators also employing themselves in manufac-

143

tures. The small farms of the country of Wals, more espe-
cially, are also the seats of manufactures on a small scale.
In France, it is the Councils of Revision that furnish the
statistics relative to the classifications of the population ;
and there, where different kinds of industry are found com-
bined in the villages, the answers returned by the young
persons interrogated as to their occupations may give rise
to some degree of uncertainty. But a still greater cause of
uncertainty as to the different parts of the population arises
from the variations in the importation and exportation of
food. England imports the thirteenth part, or thereby, of
the food which she consumes ; and there are departments
in France, as that of the Seine Inferieure, where a very con-
siderable part of the food comes from the neighbouring de-
partments. In such cases, we must be contented with a
rough estimate.

NOTE XXXVIII.

The average of the net rent in England is a little less than,
62f. per hectare. Now, in supposing that, in order to
compensate the whole differences in the prices of the diffe-
rent sorts of produce, it is necessary to value the hectolitre
of corn at 22f., the rent part would be 282 litres. In the
region in France which we have named, the average rate of
rents exceeds 55f. — which, computing the corn at 18f. the
hectolitre, give more than 300 litres.

NOTE XXXIX.

England has 14,700,000 inhabitants, of which 4,263,000
only belong to agriculture. In order that the numbers of
the cultivators should form the fortieth part of the total
population, it ought not to fall below 6,958,000 ; and if it were
so, and the cipher of the other classes remaining unchanged,
the total population would rise to 17,895,000 souls.

NOTES BY THE TRANSLATOR.

IN addition to the authorities referred to by M. Passy,
the Translator begs to cite some others, showing the evil
influence of entails and primogeniture, and the accumula-
tion of property in a few hands, which these institutions
_ give rise to, on the cultivation and productiveness of the soil,
as well as society at large.

Lord Bacon, in adverting to the statute of Edward I., re-
marks— " It hindered men who had entailed lands that they
could not make the most of them by fine and improvement ;
because none, upon so uncertain an estate as for the term
of his own life, would give Mm a fine of any value, or lay any
great stock upon the land that might yield rent, improved." —
On the Use of the Law.

Adam Smith, after giving a history of entails and pri-
mogeniture, and condemning them in strong terms, adds :
— " To improve land with profit, like all other commercial
projects, requires an exact attention to small savings and
gains, of which a man born to great fortune, even though
naturally frugal, is very seldom capable. The situation of
such a person naturally disposes him to attend rather to
ornament, which pleases his fancy, than to profit, for which
he has so little occasion. The elegance of his dress, of his
equipage, of his house and household furniture, are objects
which from his infancy he has been accustomed to have
some anxiety about. The turn of his mind, which this
habit naturally forms, follows him when he comes to think
of the improvement of land. He embellishes, perhaps, four
or five hundred acres in the neighbourhood of his house, at

145

ten times the expense which the land is worth after all his
improvements, and finds that if he were to improve his
whole estate in the same manner — and he has little taste for
any other — he would be a bankrupt before he had finished
the tenth part of it. There still remain in both parts of
the United Kingdom some great estates which have con-
tinued without interruption in the hands of the same family
since the times of feudal anarchy. Compare the present
condition of these estates with the possessions of the small
proprietors in their neighbourhood, and you will require no
other argument to convince you how unfavourable such ex-
tensive properties are to improvement." — Wealth of Nations,
vol. i. p. 153.

Lord Kames states — " A man who has amassed a great
estate in land is miserable at the prospect of being obliged
to quit his hold ; to soothe his diseased fancy he makes a
deed, securing it forever to certain heirs, who must without
end bear his name, and preserve his estate entire. Death,
it is true, must at last separate him from his idol. It is
some consolation, however, that his will governs and gives
law to every subsequent proprietor. How repugnant to
the frail state of man are such swollen conceptions ! Upon
these, however, are founded entails, which have prevailed
in many parts of the world, and unhappily at this day infest
Scotland Did entails produce no other mischief but the
gratification of a distempered appetite, they might be en-
dured, although far from deserving approbation ; but, like
other transgressions of nature and reason, they are productive
of much mischief, not only to commerce, but to the very heirs
for whose sake alone it is pretended that they were made." —
Appendix to the 4th vol. of " The Sketches of the History of
Man."

"The mode in which property was distributed in the
Spanish colonies, and the relations established with respect
to the transmission of it, whether by descent or by sale, were
extremely unfavourable to population. In order to pro-

N

146

mote a rapid increase of people in any settlement, property
in land ought to be divided into small shares, and the aliena-
tion of it rendered extremely easy. But the rapaciousness
of the Spanish conquerors of the new world paid no regard
to this fundamental maxim of policy. By degrees they ob-
tained the privilege of converting a part of these lands into
mayorasgos — a species of fiefs that can neither be divided
nor alienated. Thus a great portion of landed property,
under the rigid form of entail, is withheld from circulation,
and descends from father to son unimproved, and of little
value either to the proprietor or the community. The per-
nicious effects of these radical errors in the distribution and
nature of property in the Spanish settlements are felt
through every department of industry, and may be consi-
dered as one great cause of a progress in population so
much slower than that which has taken place in better con-
stituted colonies." — Dr Robertson's History of America, vol.
iv. p. 27.

"It is not my province to inquire if, in point of right, a
man has the power of disposing of a property, after he shall
cease to exist, in favour of another not yet in existence,
nor to examine the political consequences which such a
right draws after it, but its economical effects are detestable."
(Here the author quotes passages from Adam Smith and M.
de Sismondi in support of his views, and adds) — " Since
Smith wrote this passage the feudal usages in Scotland have
undergone a material change. The English Administration
introduced into that country, and its improved means of
communication, have greatly increased the returns from the
land. Still the people of the British islands have, generally
speaking, suffered extensively from the agglomeration of
property. ***** Finally, the law of primogeni-
ture has become much less fatal since, from the increased
wealth of nations, the greater part of it has come to consist
of personal property ; and it is fortunate that the latter can-
not be subjected to entails, and is thus beyond the reach of
those unjust laws whose aim is to advantage one member of a

148

family to the injury oftJte rest. ' — Full Course of Practical
Political Economy, by Jean Baptiste Say, 2 vols. Paris, 1840.

Professor Blanqui, in noticing a late work of M. F. Es-
trada—" An Eclectic Course of Political Economy" — states :
" This writer has pointed out with much perspicuity the
vices of the economical system under which Spain has been
administered since Charles V. The questions relative to
tithes, entails, primogeniture, and majorats, are nowhere
treated with greater ability than in his work, in which
we may perceive, still better than in that of Jovel-
lauos, the real causes of the decline of Spain, and the injury
occasioned to that fine country by the bad economical laws
with which it has been afflicted for nearly three hundred years."
— The History of Political Economy in Europe, by M.
Blanqui, 2 vols. Paris, 1842.

•' It is an undoubted fact that in nine-twentieths of France
the lauds cultivated with the greatest care, and the most
successfully, are those which belong to small proprietors,
who labour them themselves.

*' If we survey the cantons of the kingdom wherein the
art of agriculture is in the most forward state, and the
greatest produce is obtained, such as Flanders and Alsace ;
if, passing the French frontiers, we observe the contiguous
continental states, which cd,n furnish examples of a rich and
prosperous husbandry, such as the best cultivated parts of
Belgium, the Palatinate of the Rhine, or Switzerland, we
will find them invariably to be the countries where farming is
practised on a small or middling scale." — Agricultural Annals
of Roville, by M. de Bombasle.

"Small properties tend incontestibly to promote the
rapid increase of the population ; they are very favourable
to the rearing of roots and garden stuffs, which, on a given
surface, yield the greatest quantity of alimentary substances.

" It would be easy to prove that, under the influence of
the system of small properties, carried out to its extreme limits,

148

the soil of France is capable of nourishing ten times the num-
ber of inhabitants that it supports at present. * * * * *
We are entitled to believe that in England, as in France,
small properties would, under a system of entire freedom,
gain ground over large estates. The English aristocracy,
however, look upon entails and primogeniture as the last
and strongest bulwark of their power and existence. They
are sensible that if things were left to their natural course,
the superiority of small properties would be established.
The very policy which they pursue proves the inferiority
of the present system, and shows that under one of entire
freedom they would be unable to sustain a competition with
small proprietors." — Political Manual, by V. Guichard —
chap., Division of Property — 1st vol. Paris, 1842.

" Early in the revolutionary war, Jefferson succeeded in
repealing this colonial law (the English law of entail), and
he soon after obtained an abrogation of the law of primo-
geniture (now abrogated in all the States of the Union).
The effect of the change has been great, and has spread
universally in Virginia. Men's disposition of their property
has followed the legal provision; no one now thinks of
making his eldest son his general heir ; a corresponding
division of wealth has taken place ; there is no longer a
class living in luxurious indulgence while others are de-
pendent and poor ; you no longer see so many great equi-
pages, but you meet everywhere with carriages sufficient
for use and comfort, and though formerly some families
possessed more plate than any one house can now show, the
whole plate in the country (says a late historian) is increased
forty if not fifty fold. It is affirmed, with equal confidence,
that though the class of over-refined persons has been ex-
ceedingly curtailed, if not exterminated, the number of
well-educated people has been incalculably increased; nor
does a session pass without disclosing talents which sixty or
seventy years ago would have been deemed so rare as to
carry a name from north to south of the Union." — Lord
Brougham's Sketch of the Late President Jefferson.

149

"In this respect (the subdivision of property) Franco,
more equitable than England, has also shown herself more
politic. While our laws favour by a continual action the
accumulation of landed property, hers, on the contrary,
tend to a perpetual subdivision of it. It is possible that
the system in France may not be confined within proper
bounds, but even were it carried to an extreme, it is less
prejudicial than the opposite one." — Sir Walter Scott's Mis-
cellaneous Works.

" Whether, therefore, we look to the industrial interests
and economic welfare of the community, which are seriously
affected by the existing laws, or to the civil and political
privileges of the people, which may be endangered by them,
or to the permanent stability of our institutions, which may
be brought into imminent peril by further progress in the
same direction, we are of opinion that the state of society
loudly demands a change, and that it cannot be long de-
ferred without exposing us to the danger of a more violent
remedy. We remember conversing with an intelligent
American at a time when our views on the subject had not
been matured, and being much struck with his remark,
when he said — ' Our institutions appear to be more demo-
cratic than yours, and it may be thought that we are more
in danger of a revolution from some sudden impulse on the
populace ; but, in reality, we have a protection of which you
are utterly destitute — a protection arising from the posses-
sion of property on the part of the great majority of our
people. They have all in rural districts a stake in the soil,
and the large number of country proprietors is more than
an equipoise against the democratic tendency of our civio
population.' The same testimony is borne by all the lead-
ing publicists of France ; they ascribe their former revolu-
tion mainly to the discontents engendered by the old sys-
tem, by which the possession of the soil was entailed on a
few families ; while they affirm that a similar revolution
cannot happen again, since, by the abolition of that system,
the soil has come into the possession of a majority of the

N 2

150

inhabitants. There may be emeutes in cities, and even a
change of dynasty from political causes ; but there is no
probability of a wide devastating revolution, such as that of
1789, because since that period the number of proprietors
has multiplied at least to 3,000,000, representing a popula-
tion of 15,000,000 of souls !

" In regard to the interests of trade and commerce, which
depend mainly on the home market, it will be found that
the great principle announced by Malthus holds good every
where—' that the excessive wealth of a small number is not
so valuable, in respect of real demand, as is tJie more mode-
rate wealth of the greater number."

" It is surely deserving of notice that not only France,
but Belgium, Switzerland, Rhenish Prussia, Bavaria, Hol-
land, and America, are all under a system such as we con-
tend for ; and it may be inferred from the general condition
of these countries, that it is not unfavourable to the tem-
poral welfare of the community."

" We find, too, that in Kent, one of the richest agricultu-
ral counties in England, the law of primogeniture has never
obtained ; yet it exhibits a goodly array of substantial pro-
prietors, without any of the poverty which we are taught
to expect from the proposed change in our present system."
— Emancipation of the Soil, and Free Trade in Land (under-
stood to be by Dr Buchanan of the Free Church). 1845.

The author of this able pamphlet might have added, that
in the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands, the law of
equal division prevails, and that all of them exhibit the
happiest populations, and the best farming within the
British dominions. We quote from a late writer —
"Guernsey contains five times as many inhabitants to the
square mile as Ireland does, while the soil is naturally less
fertile, and only two-thirds of it can be cultivated. It sup-
ports a population, with reference to her soil, nearly five
times as numerous as that of Ireland, and every Guernsey-
man has a comfortable home to live in, a clean bed to sleep
in, and plenty to eat and drink every day in the year—a
beggar is not seen."

151

The same remarks apply to the Ionian Islands, where the
Code-Napoleon is in force.

" Such, in point of fact, is the consequence of a too un-
equal division of wealth. Whatever may be the state of
the arts of industry, or the productive powers of society — it
being impossible to deprive the rich of the right of sacrific-
ing, in vain pleasures, the incomes capable of furnishing the
means of subsistence to numerous families — to prevent them
from preserving in gardens, walks, and parks, the land fit for
cultivation — from keeping packs of hounds, horses, hunting
grounds — and from supporting a great retinue of lazy and
useless menials — in a word, from absorbing in superfluities,
in the gratifications of luxury and whim, a part of their
wealth— the population will remain depressed in numbers
and well-being, in the exact ratio that the institutions ad-
vantage the minority.

" There exists in Hungary a domain which the Princes of
the house of Esterhazy have devoted to the pleasures of
the chase. A lake of great extent preserves the water-
fowl— thick forests furnish shelter for deer and wild boars
— and a vast plain, left uncultivated, is set apart for phea-
sants and partridges. ' Ah ! were I the owner of that royal
domain,' said the Prince de Ligne, * soon would there rise
up on the banks of the lake a handsome village — the plain
would soon be covered with farms and hamlets — and with
what delight would I not listen to the joyous hum of the
numerous inhabitants whom the place would nourish ?'" —
On Aristocracy, fyc., by M. H. Passy, author of the foregoing
Memoir, I vol., p. 8. Paris, 1826.

" I have long had a suspicion that Gobbet's complaints of
the degradation and sufferings of the poor in England con-
tained much truth, though uttered by him in the worst
possible spirit. It is certain that the peasantry here (in
Tuscany, where the French law of equal division in succes-
sion exists) are much more generally the proprietors of
their own land than with us ; and I believe them to be much

152

more independent and in easier circumstances. This is, as
I believe, the grand reason why so many of the attempts at
revolution have failed in these countries. A revolution
would benefit the lawyers, the savans, the merchants,
bankers, and shopkeepers ; but I do not see what the labour-
ing classes would gain by it ; for them the work has been
done already in the destruction of the feudal nobility and
great men ; and, in my opinion, this blessing is enough to
compensate the evils of the French revolution, for the good
endures, while the effects of the massacres and devastations
are fast passing away." — Dr Arnold's Life and Correspon-
dence, vol. i. p. 66.

Mr Laing, speaking of the law of equal divisions in suc-
cessions in operation in France, which the " Edinburgh Re-
view" (for 1823, on the " French Law of Succession,") pre-
dicted would turn that country into " a great pauper warren,"
says — " France owes her present prosperity and rising in-
dustry to this very system of subdivision of property, which
allows no man to live in idleness, and no capital to be em-
ployed without a view to its reproduction, and places that
great instrument of industry and well-being in the hands of
all classes. The same area of arable ground, according to
Dupin, feeds now a population greater by eight millions, and
certainly in greater abundance and comfort than under the
former system of succession. In this view, the comparison
between the old feudal construction of society in France,
and the new under the present law of succession, resolves
itself into this result — that one-third more people are sup-
ported under the new in greater abundance and comfort from
the same extent of arable land. « « « Minute labour
on small portions of arable land gives evidently, in equal
soils and climates, a superior productiveness where these
small portions belong, in property, as in Flanders, Holland,
Friesland, and Ditchmarsh in Holstein, to the farmer. It is
not pretended by our agricultural writers that our large
farmers, even in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, or the Lo-
tbians, approach to the garden-like cultivation, attention to

153

manures, drainage, and clear state of land, or in productive-
ness from a small space of soil not originally rich, which
distinguish the small farmers of Flanders and their system."
— Notes of a Traveller, by S. Laing, Esq.

To the article in the " Edinburgh Review" referred to,
an able reply appeared in the " Westminster Review," No.
IV. Baron Stae'Ps " Letters on England" may be consulted
on the same subject, and as showing how well the French
law has worked in practice. But the work we would above
all refer to for an approving testimony in its favour, and
a thorough exposure of the evils of our system, is one
published by G. and J. Dyer in 1844, entitled— " The
Aristocracy of Britain, and the Laws of Entail and Primo-
geniture, judged by recent French writers ; being selections
from the works of Passy, O'Connor, Beaumont, Sismondi,
Buret, Guizot, Constant, Dupin, Say, Blanqui, and Mignet,
•with Explanatory and Statistical Notes," &c. Reference to
the same effect may also be made to Douglas Jerrold's
Newspaper, and other newspapers, metropolitan and pro-
vincial, in which the laws of privilege and their evil effects
have recently been examined in a liberal and intelligent
spirit. An excellent work by Mrs Loudon, late of Leaming-
ton, now in Paris, " Philanthropic Economy," &c., also
deserves to be consulted, as well as some of the writings of
Miss Martineau, Colonel Thompson, and W. J. Fox — Tait's
and Douglas Jerrold's Magazines unay likewise be cited. In
1826, when the Villele Ministry introduced a bill into the
Chamber of Peers for restoring primogeniture and entails,
the question underwent a thorough discussion, when the mea-
sure was opposed by all the most able, practical, and Con-
servative statesmen of the day, such as Chancellor Pasquier,
the Duke de Gazes, the Duke de Broglie, Count Mole,
Prince Tallyrand, and others, and thrown out by a great
majority. The speeches, as given at length in the " Courier
Francais," have been collected by M. Isambert, and will be
found in his treatise " On Majorats and Entails," published
at Paris in 1827. The economical and social evils of entails

154

and primogeniture are well pointed out by Filangiere in his
work on Legislation. See also Mr H. Bulwer's work on
France, " The Monarchy of the Middle Classes," wherein
the existing law of that country, in regard to successions,
is ably vindicated.

" That the existing inequality of property is a great moral
and political evil, has been attempted to be shown in a pre-
ceding chapter. The means of diminishing this inequality,
which in that chapter were urged as an obligation of private
life, are not likely to be fully effectual so long as the law
encourages its continuance. A man who possesses an estate
in land dies without a will. He has two sons ; why should
the law declare that one of them should be rich and the
other poor ? Is it reasonable ? Is it just ? As to its rea-
sonableness, I discover no conceivable reason why, because
one brother is born a twelvemonth before another, he
should possess ten times as much property as the younger.
Affection dictates equality ; and in such cases the dictate of
affection is commonly the dictate of reason. Civil laws
ought, as moral guides of the community, to discourage great
inequality of property. The partial distribution of in-
testate estates is only an evil of casual operation ; but the
laws which make certain estates inalienable, or, which is not
very different, allow the present possessor to entail them,
is constant and habitual," &c. — Essays on the Principles of
Morality, fyc., by Jonathan, Dymond.

" But the fallen dynasty being suspected of the design of
re-establishing the aristocracy of the soil, found itself
hampered in carrying out measures which would have been
favourable to agriculture. Since the revolution of 1830, a
greater freedom of action has been acquired, and it is since
then that it has made the most rapid advances. Its
progress has been such since 1789, that its produce has in-
creased 40 per cent. The greatest share in this increase is
attributable to the subdivision of the soil among a greater
number of persons who cultivate it, if not with greater

155

science, at least with more energy and a stricter regard to
economy ; to the sale of the properties of the emigrants ; to
the reclamation of waste lands ; to the more general cul-
tivation of potatoes, brought about chiefly by the influence
of Parmentier ; to the introduction of artificial grasses ; to
the improvements in the breeds of live stock, and the rear-
ing of domestic animals ; to the great increase in merinos ;
and, finally, to the exertions made by scientific agriculturists,
especially Mathew de Bombasle, to propagate sound agri-
cultural doctrines. At the present day the onward movement
of agriculture continues to take place on all points of the
territory, and is perhaps more rapid than in any other
country." — Patria, or an Encyclopedia of France, by a
Society of Savans, article Agriculture. Paris, 1847.

" Accumulation should be stopped in no arbitrary way,
but by the non-allowance of a custom, if it be only a cus-
tom— a repeal of the law, if it be a law — of primogeniture,
which tends to a universal depravation of manners, which
alienates the heart of brother from brother, which marks
one out for a condition of ease and luxury, and either
throws the others upon hard exertions, or else by quarter-
ing them upon the public in different departments, in that
way corrupts them and injures the public. We profess to
venerate the Bible ; now the Mosaic institutes allowed no
accumulation of land. When the Jews made conquest of
the soil of Canaan, they marked out moderate properties ;
they allowed of no adding one to another, in any instance,
for a longer period than that of their year of jubilee, the
fiftieth year, when all reverted to the old division ; and the
heaviest and direst of their curses were levelled against
those who should remove land-marks. The accumulations
of property among ourselves, while they raise princely
fortunes on the one hand, by the mere lapse of time and
tendency to constant growth ; on the other, preserve the
misery and wretchedness to which they offer so striking a
a contrast, which we cannot believe to be a law of nature
and society, which we cannot think, with Sir Robert Peel,

156

belongs t6 the progress of civilisation, that should soothe
these inequalities rather than exaggerate them," &c. —
Lectures, chiefly addressed to the Working Classes, by W .J.
Fox — Lecture No. 16.

"To a man who looks with sympathy and brotherly
regard on the mass of the people, who is chiefly interested
in the 'lower classes,' England must present much that is
repulsive. Though a monarchy in name, she is an aristo-
cracy in fact ; and an aristocratical caste, however adorned
by private virtue, can hardly help sinking an infinite chasm
between itself and the multitude of men. A privileged
order, possessing the chief power of the state, cannot but
rule in the spirit of an order, cannot respect the mass of
the people, cannot feel that for them governments chiefly
exist and ought to be administered, and* that for them the
nobleman holds his rank in trust. The condition of the lower
orders at the present moment is a mournful comment on
English institutions and civilisation. The multitude are
depressed in that country to a degree of ignorance, want,
and misery, which must touch every heart not made of
stone. In the civilised world there are few sadder spec-
tacles than the contrast presented in Great Britain, of
unbounded wealth and luxury, with the starvation of thou-
sands and tens of thousands crowded into cellars and dens,
without ventilation or light, compared with which the
wigwam of the Indian is a palace. Misery, famine, brutal
degradation, in the neighbourhood and presence of stately
mansions, which ring with gaiety and dazzle with pomp
and unbounded profusion, shock us as no other wretched-
ness does; and this is not an accidental, but an almost
necessary, effect of the spirit of aristocracy and that of
trade acting intensely together. It is a striking fact that
the private charity of England, though almost incredible,
makes little impression on this mass of misery; thus teach-
ing the rich and titled ' to be just before they are generous,'
and not to look to private munificence as a remedy for the evil$
eftelfi&h institutions." — Dr Channing. Duty of Free Statet.

157

" The true course for Napoleon seems to us to have been
indicated, not only by the state of Europe, but by the means
which France, in the beginning of her revolution, had found
most effectual. He should have identified himself with some
great interests, opinions, or institutions, by which he might
have bound to himself a large party in every nation. To
contrast himself advantageously with former governments
should have been the key of his policy. He should have
placed himself at the head of a new order of things, which
should have worn the face of an improvement of the social
state. He might have insisted on the great benefits that had
accrued to France from the establishment of uniform laws,
which protect alike all classes of men ; and he might have
virtually pledged himself to the subversion of the feudal in-
equalities which still disfigure Europe. He might have
insisted on the favourable changes to be introduced into
property by abolishing the entails which followed it, the
right of primogeniture, and the exclusive privileges of a
haughty aristocracy." — Dr Channing. Character of Na-
poleon Bonaparte.

t( But the revolution in our law of succession, which we
made fifty years ago, yet remains to be effected in many
countries in Europe where the law of primogeniture still
exists. In England it is the source, and permanent cause,
of that excessive opulence which so unduly augments the
political power of the aristocracy, and of that extreme
misery that decimates the poorer classes. All the younger
sons, all the daughters whom a selfish policy cuts off from
a share of the family estate, become burdens on the nation.
As in the middle ages the strong bands, known under the
names of fleecers, reivers, banditti, &c., were recruited from
the ranks of the younger sous and the bastards of the great
barons ; so, in the present day, in England, ai*e the army,
the navy, the church, and public offices of all kinds, the
booty of the younger sons, of the sons-in-law, and the
bastards of the aristocracy. Take away this plunder, and
the British aristocracy would find in its own bosom its most

o

158

formidable enemies." &c — Political Dictionary, voce Pri-
mogeniture. Paris, 1843.

" It was the law of succession which gave to equality its
final consummation. I am astonished that publicists, both
ancient and modern, have not attributed to the laws of
succession a greater influence in the progress of human
affairs. It is true that these laws belong to the civil order
of things, but they ought to be placed at the head of politi-
cal institutions, for they influence, in an incredible degree,
the social condition of nations, of which political laws are
only the expression. They, moreover, act upon society in
a sure and uniform manner, and, as it Avere, lay hold on
generations before their birth. By means of them, man is
armed with a power almost divine over the future destiny
of his species. Let the legislator once regulate the suc-
cessions of his fellow-citizens, and he may repose himself
for centuries : the movement once imparted to his work,
he may withdraw his hand from it ; the machine acts by its
own impulsive power, and, unguided, proceeds in the given
direction. Constructed in a certain manner, it unites, con-
centrates, and groups property, and soon after pours around
certain individuals, and causes an aristocracy to spring, as
it were, out of the soil. Fashioned on a different principle,
it divides, breaks down, and disseminates property and
power." — On Democracy in America, by A. de Tocqueville,
deputy. Paris, 1838.

" The revolution in France was much more complete in
leading to the division of property than the English revolu-
tion, which allowed the continuance of those laws of
privilege that still affect the condition of a great part of
the landed property. These laws, as conducive to the
concentration of wealth as they are contrary to the spirit
of representative government, form a sort of an anachronism
with its civilisation and prosperity. In France, on the con-
trary, the revolution threw down all barriers which opposed
the free circulation of wealth. It follows, from what has

159

been said, that political liberty, which is always in propor-
tion to the freedom with which wealth circulates, must
necessarily become greater in France than in all the other
countries of Europe, including England, where, as in the
rest of them, property has not been freed from the shackles
with which rulers have thought fit to encumber it." — On
tfte Influence of the Distribution of Wealth on Society, by Vis-
count de Launnay. Paris; 1830.

•' Society, such as it is now in England, will not continue
to endure. According as education makes its way among
the people, the cancerous sore which has gnawed social
order since the beginning of the world, a sore that causes
all the suffering and popular discontent that we see, will
be detested. The too great inequality of ranks and fortunes
was borne with so long as it was concealed, on the one
hand by ignorance, and on the other by the factitious
organisation of large towns; but so soon as that inequality
becomes generally apparent, it will receive its death-blow.
Reconstruct, if you can, aristocratic fictions. Try to
persuade the poor man, when he shall be able to read —
him to whom knowledge is daily supplied by the press
scattering its lights in every town and village — try to
persuade this individual, possessing the same information
and intelligence as yourselves, that he ought to submit to
all sorts of privations, while some one, his neighbour, en-
joys, without labour, all the superfluities of life, and your
efforts will be fruitless. Do not expect from the masses
virtues which are beyond the force of humanity." — Essays
on English Literature, by Viscount Chateaubriand. Paris,
1838.

" Although an inquiry into the origin of those estates be
unnecessary, the continuation of them, in their present
state, is another subject. It is a matter of national concern.
As hereditary estates, the law has created the evil, and it
also ought to provide the remedy. Primogeniture ought
to be abolished, not only because it is unnatural and unjust,

160

but because the country suffers by its operation. By cut-
ting off, as before observed, the younger children from
their proper portion of inheritance, the public is loaded
with the expense of maintaining them, and the freedom of
elections violated by the over-bearing influence which this
unjust monopoly of family property produces. Nor is this
all. It occasions a waste of national property. A con-
siderable part of the land of the country is rendered
unproductive by the great extent of parks and chases which
this law serves to keep up, and this at a time when the
annual production of grain is not equal to the national con-
sumption. In short, the evils of the aristocratic system are
so great and numerous, so inconsistent with everything
that is just, wise, natural, and beneficent, that when they
are considered, there ought not to be a doubt that many
who are classed under that description, will wish to see
such a system abolished." — Paine's answer to Burke.

" Allowing for the change effected by the Reform Bill of
1831, England is still in the same political condition she
was 150 years ago. Her revolutions have ever led to a
change of dynasty, and not of her political existence ; they
fortified the aristocratic principle, conferred fresh strength
on the nobility, and confirmed feudal rights, primogeniture,
tithes, and monopolies. The French revolution, on the
contrary, introduced the democratic principle into the law —
laid the axe to the root of all feudal inequalities, and
caused to spring out of the soil a whole generation of free-
men. The English revolution stirred up a country of a
few thousand square miles ; that of France convulsed the
world. This was because the one was made by and for the
aristocracy, and the other by and for the nation at large ;
because the one had its origin in the interests of a caste,
and the other in the convictions of a people. On the one
side are seen superannuated customs, a social condition to
be recast, a spurious liberty, unceasing toil, a disturbed
repose, and a precarious future. On the other, a govern-
ment with principles well-defined, all the progress of

161

modern civilisation, and all the hopes of the future. What
is required to regenerate England ? A revolution, and
how terrible a one !" — Popular Almanac of France for 1844,
article, France and England, by M. Sarrans, junior.

" To sum up all, the political condition of England is
this : — An aristocracy of position in the higher classes ; an aris-
tocracy of imitation in the middle ranks; an aristocracy
of servility in the inferior orders. The Tories despise
democracy, the Whigs fear it, the Radicals court it, and the
People do not understand it. Whence, then, can come the
knowledge which must enlighten the English people ? It
is not from those who surround them, and who are in-
terested in perpetuating their ignorance ; it is not from
those who fortify themselves by their aid, in order, as soon
as they are firmly seated in power, to oppress them of
new ; it is neither from the Parliament, the clubs, nor the
meetings ; it is not from that convention whose conception
is so gigantic, and whose action is so insignificant. What
the English stand in need of are, the moral support and the
the practical lessons of a country thoroughly democratical, like
France." — Preface to a Translation, by Elias Regnault, of
Bentham's Political Catechism. Paris, 1839.

At a meeting held at Edinburgh, on 4th March 1847, ot
proprietors of entailed estates, for making representations
to Government against the present Law of Entail in Scot-
land, the following remarks, as abridged from the Scots*
man's report, were made —

The Chairman (Provost Black) stated that he could
hardly conceive anything more absurd than that the earth,
which was given to all, should be trammelled and tied up
by one generation for another. He could see no advantage
in such a system. He believed that the entail system was
the cause of a great deal of distress amongst families, and
frequently gave rise to expensive law-suits. He was told
by Professor Low that entails were one of the greatest
obstacles to the improvement of the land, and that, in,

o 2

162

travelling through the country, a person could easily dis-
tinguish whether an estate was entailed or not, by the
backward condition in which it was allowed to remain. In
the districts where destitution was felt, the distress of the
people was aggravated by the circumstance that the pro-
prietors were so tied up that they could not expend money
in the improvement of their estates. Entail was one of the
great curses of Ireland, &c.

Sir David Baird — The present movement commenced
about a year ago ; and since then the cause of Free Trade
has triumphed- — the greatest legislative improvement in
any age or country has begun — the abolition of protection
and the removal of restrictions must be the rule of future
legislation, and the important question must now force
itself on the consideration of all men connected with en-
tailed properties, and not only of them, but of all Scotsmen
of every grade — whether the real property of the country is
to be continued to be bound by shackles and restrictions,
to which property of no other description is subjected,
which have even heretofore been sufficiently prolific of
embarrassments, but which/ in a movement like the
present, and in the new order of things, may consign us
into greater and interminable difficulties. The Entail Act
of 1685 was denounced among the grievances of which a
list was sent up to William and Mary on their accession.
Half a century later the same sentiments were expressed.
At the present day I consider our law of entail as operating
injuriously, not only on heirs of entail and their families,
but on the whole structure of society. The printed report
of the Parliamentary Commission in 1828 furnished ample
evidence on this head, and yet nothing was done. Ireland
is also cursed with a law of entail, although not so stringent
as ours, and if that country now exhibits so vast an amount
of misery, it is chiefly owing to her laws of succession being
opposed to those of nature and reason. Entails are, in my
opinion, the plague-spot of that unfortunate country — the
poisoned root which has envenomed and destroyed, as with
a gangrene, all her social relations ; and, moreover, that

163

until such a radical and complete change in these laws take
place — such a change as will enable land to be transferred
freely and conveniently from hand to hand, so that the
land's worth may be applied to the land's improvement, it
is futile to expect any real regeneration of the country from
all the efforts of Government or individuals.

Mr D. Sandford, advocate (the author of a law work on
entails), said that he had always looked upon the act of
1685 as the last efforts of an expiring feudalism, and he felt
certain that it could not be defended against a strong ex-
pression of public opinion in the present age of science,
civilisation, and freedom. The greatest authorities in our
law had likewise condemned the Scottish system of en-
tails. » .

,Mr Oswald, M.P. for Glasgow, said that he believed that
there was not a single person in Glasgow, of any considera-
tion and intelligence, who was not convinced that the
worst law of Scotland was that relating to entails, and he
was sure that the city would readily respond to the senti-
ments expressed at this meeting.

A public meeting on the same subject has recently been
held at Glasgow, at which resolutions, condemnatory of the
law of entail, were passed.

EXTRACT

FROM M. P ASSY'S WORK « ON ARISTOCRACY,"
CHAP. XVI.

ON THE EFFECTS OF AN EQUALITY OF RIGHTS IN FRANCE.

After having considered the effects of the predominance
of an aristocracy the least exclusive in Europe, in a coun-
try (England) where extensive liberties have attracted to
it all the benefits of civilisation, let us see what is the state
of society in another, where an equality of rights has pre-

164

vailed. It will be at once perceived that I allude to France.
For more than thirty years the abolition of the privileges
of property has left to wealth in that country no other re-
gulator than the diversity of talents and the accidents of
fortune ; landed successions have devolved on children of
the same marriage in equal portions ; a new generation has
been formed under the influence of laws founded on natural
equity ; these laws have borne their fruits ; and it is by the
latter that the question must be determined.

If France has retrograded — if its population has become less
dense, is poorer, and less moral— if mendicity has been the
condition of a great number of individuals — if the laws are
less respected, and if the axe of the executioner is oftener
in requisition — there can be no doubt of the new laws being
vicious. But if, on the contrary, France has advanced with
giant strides in the career of the arts and civilisation — if
its population, wealth, morals, industry — in a word, all that
constitute the splendour and the happiness of a people-
have been augmented, distributed, and improved in its
bosom, we can only render homage to institutions so pro-
ductive of noble and beneficent results.

Let us, therefore, examine the present state of France,
and see the nature of the changes introduced into it since
1789. Let us then appreciate what it has lost or gained by
a change of system.

Before the Revolution, France, reduced to a state of bank-
ruptcy, was only able to furnish six hundred millions of
francs, annually required for the state expenses — a milliard
is easily obtained from her present resources. Before the
Revolution, France had only twenty-five millions of inhabi-
tants, and she now reckons more than thirty. Before the
Revolution, misery reigned in the rural districts, and all the
great towns swarmed with a populace as indolent as it was
rude and dissolute. This state of things no longer exists.
Such has been in the course of thirty years the increased
progress of labour and wealth over the population, that
ease and comfort have penetrated into every rank; the
day-labourer has seen his share of well-being augmented,

165

and, better fed, clothed, and lodged, he is finally more li-
berally provided with the sweets of life than at any former
period. An industry more active and better regulated —
cultivation extended over several millions of hectares of
land formerly in a state of nature — the produce and rents
of land doubled — manufactures established on different
parts of the territory — a population more laborious and in-
telligent, extracting from the same productive funds the
vastest means of well-being and prosperity. Such are the
fruits of the equality of rights. Such are the facts which
that equality opposes to the selfish and mendacious asser-
tions of its detractors.

Will it be objected, that in all this is only seen a simple
effect of the ordinary development of an industry improve-
able in its nature, and that without any modifications of
the social organisation, time alone would have produced
the same results ? But how comes it that in past centuries
the lapse of time never gave a similar impulse to the pro-
ductive powers of the nation ? Let our opponents explain
to us how it happens that not one of the other states of
Europe has shown a similar advance. And how much more
truly admirable does this regeneration appear when we
consider under the dominion of what circumstances it was
accomplished ! It was a prey to the ravages of foreign
and civil wars, during which so many provinces were laid
waste, so many towns burned or destroyed — it was after hav-
ing lost her colonies, her fleets, her commerce — after hav-
ing experienced the disastrous effects of her assignats, and
the consolidation of her public debt — it was, in fine, after
having undergone the treble scourges of anarchy, despotism,
and administrative centralisation, that France showed her-
self radiant with wealth and prosperity. Under Louis XIV.,
under that reign which has been painted to us as the golden
age of the monarchy, some years of an unfortunate war
sufficed to make all the provinces a theatre of misery and
desolation — and yet see how struggles more sanguinary,
calamities more prolonged, trials more severe, did not even
arrest the car of fortune, so much energy was there in the
springs which bore it onwards.

166

But if it be impossible for the most bigotted partisans of
privilege to deny the reality of the material benefits which
France enjoys, there is a field in which facts of a more
vague and less tangible kind furnish greater room for cavil ;
and it is accordingly the morality of the people they accuse
of having degenerated. In their opinion the abolition of
the old regime has dried up the source of the noble and
chivalrous sentiments on which the old society justly prided
itself. At present, say they, there are no longer found
urbanity, dignity, or. elegance in the manners— no disinte-
restedness in men's hearts; honour has even lost that flower
of delicacy which was the soul of the monarchy, the infalli-
ble rule of private duties, and the faithful auxiliary of the
laws and morality ; in a word, to a nation essentially polite,
religious, and devoted, has succeded one abandoned to the
suggestions of the most grovelling and vulgar interests.
What can be replied to such selfish declamation ? Must we
be compelled, in order to exculpate the modern generation,
to exhume the so much vaunted reminiscences of the old
French aristocracy ? Must we be forced to recal the Jac-
queries, the massacres of the Armagnacs and the Bourguig-
nons, St. Barthelemy — the furies of the League, the mad-
ness of the Fronde, the mistresses and the bastards of the
great King, the unbridled corruption of the rakes of the
Regency, the shameful failings of Louis XV., and the de-
baucheries of his Court ? Perhaps it will be said that if
such were the manners of the higher classes, they, at least,
did not extend to the masses kept at a distance by privilege.
Let us then seek for a greater assemblage of facts, and, in
order to judge of the progress of public morals, let us ex-
amine the conduct which the nation observed in circum-
stances in which the prostration of all the powers that pro-
tect public order left it without any other check than the
voice of opinion, and the workings of the social conscience.

Two periods may furnish us with information on this
head— the one embraces the first years of the Revolution,
the other those which followed the fall of the imperial
throne.

It is known to what deplorable excesses the French Re-

167

volution gave birth. Europe lays the blame of these on
the principles in the name of which the Reformers acted, as
if, from the date of the publication of the new doctrines, a
day had been sufficient to change the spirit and temper of
a nation — as if it were not always of the past that we must
seek an account of the ideas, sentiments, and passions,
which bring about political subversions. Such, neverthe-
less, is the case. These classes, whose collision and struggles
engendered so much violence and crime — that nobility which
ran off to enrol itself under the standards of the enemies of
its country — that people whom it unpiteously proscribed —
those factions that by turns butchered each other with the
sword of the law — those men who figured in the reign of
terror — all were the nation of the old regime. The vicious
elements, whose fermentation produced so many calamities
— it was in those regretted times, in which the clergy were
rich and numerous, the nobility exclusive and privileged,
the monarch invested with a power without bounds, that
they were collected in the social body : it was because
habits of luxury and domination had enervated or cor-
rupted it that the nobility knew neither how to resign itself
to the sacrifice of its unjust prerogatives, nor to combat
honourably in its own defence : it was because it was de-
based, degraded, and oppressed by the nobility, that the
people rushed into the arena panting for vengeance and
disorders.

Subsequently the nation underwent new trials. Twenty-
five years later the French territory was invaded; twice in
less than eighteen months hostile armies ravaged the pro-
Tinces ; twice the destruction of the Government unloosed
the bonds of authority from a multitude a prey to all the
humiliations of defeat, and the sufferings of a frightful
scarcity. What was the conduct, then, of a nation that is
said to have been demoralised by the Revolution, and in
the bosom of which twenty years of war, and twelve of a
despotism, whose glory did not lessen its deteriorating in-
fluence, ought to have sown fresh seeds of depravity ? We
saw it contribute with all its power to the maintenance of

168

public tranquillity, repair with ardour the disasters of the
invasion, resist the instigations of factions bent on troubles
and disorders — finally, display, in the midst of the most dif-
ficult conjunctures, a wisdom and a prudence that confounded
the hopes of its enemies. Much more — at the most critical
moment when famine, the outrages of a foreign soldiery,
political hatreds and dissensions, seemed to combine to
provoke a catastrophe, the army was disbanded, and a multi-
tude of men, familiarised with all sorts of dangers, were
thrown back upon a sullen, disunited, and suffering popula-
tion. Well, an event, which in another age would have
inundated the country with malefactors and robbers, was
consummated without the slightest disorder. Soldiers who
had grown grey in camps, seized the spade or the shuttle,
and, drawing from their labour an honourable means of sub-
sistence, made themselves a place in society.

Here was certainly exhibited a very striking contrast
betwixt the French of 1815 and the French of 1789 ; and to
what cause can we attribute it ? To a single one — to the
difference in the legislation as to private rights. To the
exclusive, partial, and degrading laws of the old regime,
had succeeded others entirely conformable to equity ; with
individual conditions the moral habits of the people had
changed ; and if a thirst for revenge still misled a small
number, three millions of families, raised to the sweets of
property, and imbued with that conservative spirit which
comfort gives birth to, carefully watched over the mainten-
ance of public order, of which they knew the value. In
1815 in France the strength had passed to the side of the
friends of the public peace ; and thence came the calm and
resigned attitude of a nation exposed to innumerable suf-
ferings.

Do we desire still stronger proofs of the reality of the
blessings attached to the equality of rights ? Let any one
compare the respective situations of France and England
in the years that followed the general pacification. On
both sides there was disarmament ; there were to be under-
gone, besides the inconveniences of a change which accrued

169

to the employment of labour and capital, those of a transi-
tion from a state of war to that of peace— but how unequal
was the shock in each country ! Whilst England, victori-
ous, and dictating to her rival a treaty, all the advantages
of which were reserved to her, only restored a few colonies
to their ancient mother-countries, and re-opened the free
passage of the ocean to nations who were not prepared to
dispute with her the advantages of it, France, conquered,
was violently thrust back within her ancient limits; she
abandoned vast conquests, and lost the markets for her
industry of twenty millions of subjects, Belgian, German,
or Italian ; to the expenses incidental to a change of go-
vernment, she had to join both the burdensome support of
foreign armies, in the midst of provinces ruined by the war,
and the payment of the contributions imposed by the Allies
— and still she stood her ground. Agriculture, commerce,
manufactures, industry, all followed their course ; rents of
land and houses were supported ; the people found labour
and bread ; the taxes were paid ; the public roads were
safe for travellers ; and in two years the nation had
triumphed over the united scourges of invasion, military
contributions, and political disorganisation. Vainly, on the
contrary, had the British Minister, strong in the fortunate
issue of the war, time to provide for a foreseen transition.
Neither the reduction of the budget, the flourishing state
of manufactures, colonial riches, the resources of the most
extensive foreign commerce, nor the advantages of victory,
could preserve the nation from the disastrous consequences
of an event which forced it to displace a small portion of
its immense capital ; a great number of factories were shut
up, and from eight to nine hundred thousand operatives
wandered over the counties asking that relief which the
workhouses were already affording to three millions of per-
sons. A distress so deep had the ordinary results j despair
fomented rebellion; conspiracies were hatched; plans of
insurrection were formed; four years after the peace,
blood flowed; the constitution was suspended; and little
was wanting to cause a Government that had so lately dis-

p

170

posed of the destinies of the world sink under the assaults
of a justly incensed population.

There is an important lesson to be learned from these
facts. Of the two nations, it was the most rich and indus-
trial, the one that reaped the fruits of victory, that suffered
the longest and most cruelly from a shock, of which every-
thing tended to soften the violence ; but in England, where
the supremacy of the aristocracy has reduced the labouring
classes to an unpropertied state, some families, excessively
rich, consume in luxury and idleness the fruit of the labours
of an immense multitude ; and, however advanced the
country may be, the internal industry, taking from that
cause too exclusive and contracted a direction, on the least
change in the state of the foreign trade, the masses, with-
out other means of subsistence than the wages that depend
on it, are exposed to the most irremediable misery. In
France, on the contrary, the incomes formerly absorbed
by the luxury of the privileged orders have passed into the
hands of the productive classes ; industry has followed the
direction traced by the displacement of wealth, and mul-
tiplied the means of general well-being ; turned chiefly to
the production of articles necessary to, and within the reach
of, the greater number, nothing puts a stop to it, or, if such
a misfortune occurs, the people find in 'their small capitals
resources against such accidents. Thus, in England — in
that country so proud of its laws and institutions — there are,
on an average, twice as many criminal convictions as in
France, where the population is greater by a half. There
were in France, in 1813, 4,210 criminal convictions ; in 1814,
1,723 ; in 1815, 3,362. In England there were, in 1813, 7,164 ;
in 1814, 6,390 ; in 1815, 7,813 ; and subsequently the dis-
proportion has become more considerable, allowing for
the difference in the population ! It is computed that of
late years there are in England ten capital convictions for
one in France.

Such are the disparities which those two nations present.
The peace in 1815, in particular, rendered the effects of thorn
apparent. Never were more evident the different degrees

171

of strength and vitality which nations derive from laws
more or less partial, more or less equitable and agreeable
to the general interest ; never was more clearly seen what
miseries are inseparable from the concentration of power
and property in the hands of an aristocracy.

It may, moreover, be remarked, that France is not the
only country which can be adduced as an example of the
advantages which accrue from a free circulation of pro-
perty. Although none of the other great states of Europe
have completely adopted the principle of equal rights in
regard to successions in land, there are still found in their
history circumstances which may be appealed to in support
of that principle. As often, then, as some modifications in
their laws allowed the productive classes to participate in
the species of wealth consecrated to the upholding of the
splendour of the nobility and the luxury of the clergy, the
industry and wealth of the people suddenly evinced an ex-
traordinary expansion. England herself can furnish a proof
of this. After stating that Henry VIII. carried out, without
perhaps being aware of all its consequences, the design of
humbling the nobility which his politic father, Henry VII.,
had begun, Robertson, in his History of Charles V., observes
— " By the alienation or sale of the Church lands, which
were dissipated with a profusion not inferior to the rapa-
ciousness with which they had been seized, as well as by
the privilege granted to the ancient landholders of selling
their estates, or disposing of them by will, an immense mass
of property, formerly locked up, was brought into circula-
tion. This put the spirit of industry and commerce in the
nation, and gave it some considerable degree of vigour. The
road to power and opulence became open to persons of
every condition." And from the cause here stated resulted
the high state of prosperity which the nation enjoyed under
the following reigns. The same effects were observable, in
Holland and the Protestant states of Germany, to be con-
sequent on the application to secular purposes of the pro-
perty of the Church ; and to this cause must, in a great
measure, be ascribed their industrial superiority over the

172

Catholic states. In Denmark the emancipation of the serfs,
and the sale or letting on long leases of the lands of the
Crown, gave such a stimulus to population and wealth,
that the national resources were found to be no ways im-
paired by the cession made to Sweden of the provinces of
Halland, Scania, and Bleck'ingen. In Prussia the measures
taken by Frederick II. for calling to the ownership of the
soil the productive classes, in Austria similar reforms, ope-
rated by Joseph II., were of the greatest benefit to agri-
culture, and rapidly augmented the wealth of these coun-
tries. Everywhere, in short, have we seen the prosperity
of nations constantly dependent on the extent of the
rights and means of development enjoyed by the active
and industrious classes.

In France some writers have taken it upon them to ex-
claim against the pretended dangers of the subdivision of
the soil ; but see what, after having dwelt on the numerous
evils of entails, was said on this subject about a dozen of
years ago by the celebrated Henry Storch, in a course of
political economy specially composed for the instruction of
the Grand Dukes of Russia, Nicholas (the present Em-
peror) and Michael — " The Revolution put an end to this
obstacle in France (the privileges of property), where the
number of small proprietors is at present more considerable
than in any other country in Europe. However slender
this advantage may appear, when we regard it in the light
of a compensation for the evils of that terrible catastrophe
— looked at abstractly, it is one of the greatest it is pos-
sible to conceive — and if we do not as yet perceive all its
salutary influence in the prosperity of that kingdom, it will
not be long in becoming apparent, when its Government,
adopting the maxims of moderation and wisdom, and re-
nouncing its projects of conquest and ambition, shall con-
fine itself to the cultivation of the arts of peace, industry,
and commerce.'*

Ah, then, may France cherish and maintain in all their
integrity the advantages so dearly purchased by her Re-
volution ! Justice infused into the laws, a host of anti-

173

social prejudices uprooted or weakened, property set free
from its shackles, the hope of arriving at it held out to the
working man, funds devoted to luxury and dissipation
transformed into the means of useful employment, the road
to fortune and distinction opened to all — these are the
blessings for which she is indebted to the triumph of equal
rights ; it is these that have developed the intelligence and
stimulated the energy of the more numerous classes ; these
are the causes that have fertilised our fields, increased our
knowledge, perfected our arts, and carried well-being and
the love of order into the humblest cottages of the poor.
Wo be to him who would seek to despoil us of such invalu-
able acquisitions !

FINIS,

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Page.
Translator's Preface i.-iv.

MEMOIR.

CHAPTER I.

Introduction 1-23

CHAPTER II.

Causes of the Diversity in the Modes of Cultivation 24

CHAPTEB III.

Influence of the state of the Population on the

Systems of Cultivation 24-31

CHAPTER IV.

Influence of the kinds of Produce and Consumption

on the Systems of Cultivation 31-35

CHAPTER V.

Influence of Climate on the Size of Farms 35-39 -*

CHAPTER VI.

Influence of the Nature of the Soil on the Modes

of Cultivation 40-46

CHAPTER VII.

Influence of the Civil Laws on the Size of Farms... 46-68 >

CHAPTER VIII.

On the Productive Powers of Farms of different

Sizes 68-95

CHAPTER IX.

Influence of the Size of Farms on the Social Eco-
nomy 95-118

SUPPLEMENT.
On the Distribution of Landed Property, and the

Progress of its Sub-division in France 119-130

NOTES.

By the Author 131-143

— Translator... ,. 144-173

O. S. TDLLIS, PRINTER, CUPAR-FIFE.

THE

ARISTOCRACY OF BRITAIN,

AND THE

LAWS OF ENTAIL & PRIMOGENITURE,

JUDGED BY RECENT FRENCH WRITERS :

3eing Selections from the Works of Passy, Beaumont, O'Connor,
Sismondi, Buret, Guizot, Constant, Dupin, Say, Blanqui, and
Miguet : showing the Advantage of the Law of Equal Succes-
sion:

WITH EXPLANATORY AND STATISTICAL NOTES.
Price 2s. 6d. sewed, 3s. boards.

J. & J. DYER, 24, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON; FRANCIS ORE
AND SONS, GLASGOW; G. S. TULLIS, CUPAR-FIFE.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

VHE compiler of these selections has hit upon a very ingenious and
?ery effectual way of promoting the object he has in view, namely,
;he abolition in Great Britain of the Entail and Primogeniture Laws.
Vot satisfied with the form in which other British writers have dealt
kvith the subject, be has summoned, to give evidence upon it, a nutn-
jer of the most eminent of French statesmen and publicists, who have
lad full opportunity to observe the working of the changes made in
:he law of France, and to test and correct the theories, which them-
selves and others may have formed, by actual and prolonged experi-
ment. The result is a collection of facts and opinions of very great
nterest and importance to all who wish comprehensively to study
the elements of social and political happiness. — Glasgow Chronicle.

In the various inquiries that have been made into the origin of the
distress of the working classes in this country, and the great anomalies
that exist in the distribution of wealth, few have ever penetrated so
near the heart of the disease. — Leeds Times.

A striking, remarkable, and useful book. — Anti- Corn- Law League.

We are heartily glad that a volume which demands universal perusal
has been issued at a price which brings it within the reach of all. —
General Advertiser, London*

We have been much interested in glancing over the estimates of the
present state of Britain, formed by tbe more philosophic intellects of

France — the Passys, Beaumonts, Sismondis, Constants, and Guizots

as we have found them grouped together in a little provincial work —
" The Aristocracy of Britain" — which has just issued from the press.
The editor and translator seems to be a Radical, but his little book
may be perused with profit by men of all shades of political opinion.
What seems first to strike the eye of intelligent Frenchmen in their
survey of the present condition of Britain, is the strange state of
juxtaposition in which they find abject poverty and enormous
wealth, The aristocracy of Britain stand up a more entire and
unbroken body than those of any other European country. Their

2 LAWS OF ENTAIL AND PRIMOGENITURE.

power in the Legislature is beyond comparison superior to what it is
anywhere else ; and yet, though thus imposing and formidable as a
body, the base on which they stand seems narrowing every day. One
preponderating cause of this state of things, say the French writers,
has been the great decrease which has taken place during the last half
century in the number of landed properties, and the vast increase which
has taken place in their size. The lands of England, about twenty
years before the breaking out of the first French Revolution, were di-
vided among no fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand families ;
at the close of the Revolutionary war, in 1815, they were concentrated
in the hands of only thirty-two thousand. And since this latter period,
the same concentrating process has been going on in both our own and
the sister kingdom. The Sutherland family possess nearly twice the
the extent of land in the north of Scotland that they possessed only
twenty years ago. The property of the Duke of Buccleuch, in the
south, has nearly doubled during the last fifty. We need but instance
these two cases to show not merely how property has been drawing
together, as it were, into vast masses, but also how, through the pro-
cess of accumulation, the security of the proprietors has been greatly
lessened. The concentration of landed property, in comparatively a
a few individuals, leads, in a free country, to a state of dangerous an-
tagonism between the territorial rights of the proprietor and the civil
rights of the people. — Edinburgh Witness.

The Translator has brought together a mass of most valuable infor-
mation and argument, and given to the public a work, not only of first-
rate utility, but of high interest, alike both to Tory and Democrat

Fife Herald.

Good service, then — the best of service — has the compiler of this
valuable publication rendered to society, by directing public attention
to this great question — Glasgow Citizen.

The names of these eminent men are their own sufficient recom-
mendation, and the portions selected from their several works are of
sterling value. — London Sentinel.

The condemnation which Passy, Beaumont, Guizot, Sismondi, and
others, pass upon the Laws of Primogeniture and Entail is fully borne
out by a quiet contemplation of things as they are in Great Britain at
the present moment. — Liverpool Chronicle.

Among the signs of the times which the intelligent observer will
not fail to note, must be numbered the change of opinion which is
commencing on the subject of the British Law of Primogeniture.
It is a question which lies so deep at the root of all politics, that, it may
safely be said, no political, economical, or administrative reforms will
ever do more than remove the mere superficial evils of society, so long
as this great reform remains unaccomplished. Candid persons will at
once admit that the feudal order of succession to properties is quite ar-
bitrary, and that any other rule might just as well havebeen established.
The only ground upon which this law can be defended in the eye of
reason is the alleged one, that it tends to call forth a better cultivation
of the soil, and, consequently, a greater amount of wealth at a cheaper
cost. This is the ground upon which Mr M'Culloch and all other
English economists, who are too prone to be the worshippers of wealth,
defend it. But do the observations of intelligent travellers in coun-
tries wherein the L:uv of Equal Succession obtains confirm this-

LAWS OF ENTAIL AND PRIMOGENITURE. 3

long-rooted prejudice ? By no means. Mr Laing, in his Notes of a
Traveller, has directed his attention most particularly to this subject in
the countries of Norway, Switzerland, Tuscany, Holland, Belgium,
and France, and the conclusion to which he has arrived is favourable
to the doctrines of De Beaumont, Passy, Sismondi, Guizot, Say, Dupin,
Constant, Mignet, and other distinguished statesmen and economists,
and hostile to those which meet with general acceptation in this
country. The problem for political economy to settle evidently is the
distribution of wealth as well as its production. — The Atlas, London.

In the admirable Notes, pregnant with information and acute re-
marks, given by the compiler, he has shown himself fully capable of
handling the important subject, and we trust he will continue his
labours till he has convinced his countrymen of the injustice, hard-
ship, and absurdity of these laws — Glasgow Argus.

Here is an admirable little compilation, framed on a true prin-
ciple, and embracing topics of the very highest importance. Since
France, as one unending happy consequence of her first revolution
— one which might, of itself, atone for many foul but temporary
atrocities — got rid of what remained of feudalism, her ablest arid
most philosophical political writers have gradually become the advo-
cates of, among other fundamental changes, the law of the equal suc-
cession of all the children of a family to the property of the parents ;
a principle with which a privileged landed aristocracy cannot co-exist.
— Tait's Magazine.

We recommend this as a work containing a mass of sound philoso-
phical disquisition on a subject which will, at no distant day, be of ab-
sorbing interest to the people of England. — Leicester Mercury.

One of the most important, in a moral and political view, that
has recently appeared. — Scotch Reformers' Gazette.

This is a book which we hope will be extensively read. It presents,
in the clearest and most striking light, the grand evil of evils of our
political and social condition as they are viewed by impartial and
intelligent foreigners Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle.

We have a highly favourable opinion of the work — Economist.

A very interesting and instructive volume. — Dundee Warder.

Altogether the work is very valuable and seasonable, appearing at a
time when aristocratic laws are passing through a searching ordeal —
Glasgow Examiner.

We have here collected, in one highly interesting and remarkably
cheap volume, the opinions of no less than eleven recent French
authors of the first rank and influence, upon the three subjects con-
tained in the title — Nottingham Review.

The " Aristocracy of Britain" certainly deserves to be read, marked,

and inwardly digested by all who call themselves politicians Ayles-

bury News.

This is the title of a useful and much needed volume. In look-
ing at British society in any, and in all, the three kingdoms of her
Majesty's dominions, a careful observer will perceive that.it is in an
uneasy, unhappy, and, consequently, unsafe state. The manufacturing
districts oscillate between the bustle of activity and prosperity, and-
the prostration of idleness and misery; while "Swing" writes upon

4 LAWS OP ENTAIL AND PRIMOGENITURE

the midnight heavens, in characters of fire, the tale of perennia.
distress which prevails in the agricultural districts, though they are
visited by no commercial panics, and though, in them, industry always
runs with an equable current in steady channels. It is not the great
sum total of the wealth of a country which constitutes its happiness
so much as the diffusion of wealth. We, in England, are masters of
the art of creating wealth — there is no limit to our power in this re-
spect; but we have yet to learn how to distribute it. But, until we
learn this lesson, we sballbe like a pyramid placed upon its apex —
ever in danger of tumbling down ; and our fall, if such an event should
occur, will be great just in proportion to the height of our air-based
fabric Bradford Observer.

The more immediate object of the present publication is to direct
public attention to the pernicious influence of those laws which tend
to promote the unequal distribution of wealth, especially of landed
property. In the absence of any suitable works on this subject at
home, the compiler has wisely had recourse to the literature of
France, taking care to make selections from those writers only whose
testimpriy is unimpeachable, and whose names are, for the most part,
familiar to the British public. The extracts he has given are chiefly
devoted to an investigation of the Laws of Primogeniture and Entail,
pointing out their injurious effects on the social and political institu-
tions of the country, and furnishing us with various facts in proof of
the beneficial consequences that have attended their abolition in France.
The subject is one of deep importance, arid we regret that it does not,
at the present time, attract a larger share of public attention ; seeing
that these unnatural laws, these barbarous remnants of Feudalism, lieat
the foundation of aristocratic supremacy, tending, as they do, to create
and maintain a class unnaturally strong in territorial possessions and po-
litical power, and to promote those monstrous inequalities of wealth and
condition, which are especially characteristic of the state of British
society, and are pregnant with future danger to the State — Noncon-
formist.

A Scotch Reformer, who concludes his book with the prophetic
words of Byron : —

« Methinks I hear a little bird which sings,
The people by and by will be the strongest,"

has published select passages translated from French authors. The
Translator observes in his preface: — " The changes in the old law of
France were brought about by violence, the result of a deplorable ne-
cessity ; but similar reforms in Britain are to be sought after, and will
be attained, by peaceable means alone ; and, above all, by a strenuous
appeal to the principles of reason and justice. If this publication shall
have the effect of in any degree directing the attention of Reformers, and
of their organs in the press, to a subject which, at all times important,
seems especially so at the present, when events are all tending towards
a great social transformation, the single object which the compiler has
in view, will have been attained." That the social transformation
must come, no sane man can doubt ; that it will come peaceably, is not
quite certain; but books like our translator's tend to produce that
happy consummation of the pregnant circumstances of the age, and
therefore demand our hearty commendations. — Gateshead Observer.

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