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certain that if there is bad agriculture on these small cstates, it is from some other cause than their smallness. Farms of this size are consistent with agriculture equal to any on the face of the earth.

We shall now, however, touch upon another kind of morcellement, which does amount to a serious inconvenience, and wherever it exists must have a strong tendency to keep agriculture in a low state. This is, the subdivision, not of the land of the country among many proprietors, but of the land of each proprietor into many detached pieces, or parcelles, as they are technically designated. This inconvenience has been experienced in other countries besides France, as in the canton of Zurich, in the Palatinate, and (as respects holdings, though not properties) in Ireland. In France it is carried to so great an excess, that the number of parcelles is ten times the number of côtes foncières; and as there are supposed to be twice as many côtes foncières as proprietors, the curious fact is disclosed, that on the average of France the estate of every landowner consists of twenty fragments in twenty different places. The consequences are a subject of general and increasing complaint. Great loss of time and labour; waste of cultivable soil in boundaries and paths; the inaccessibility of many parcelles without trespas sing on other properties; endless disputes and frequent litigation— are enumerated among the evils; and it is evident what obstacles the small size and dispersed position of the parcelles, and their intermixture with those of other proprietors, must oppose to many kinds of agricultural improvement.

For a considerable portion of this evil the French law of inheritance may fairly be held responsible. A certain amount of it is inevitable wherever landed properties are undergoing a double process of division and recomposition: marriages, for example, must in general bring together portions of land not adjacent. But if parents had the power of bequest, the owner of twenty parcelles, even if he adhered to the spirit of the law of equal division, would give some of the portions entire to one child, and others to another. The law, on the contrary, must divide with exact equality; and as it is generally impossible to adjust the value of patches of unequal fertility, vineyards, meadows, arable, &c., so as to satisfy everybody, it continually happens, especially in the more backward parts of France, that when the settlement is made by division instead of sale, each co-heir insists on taking a share of every parcelle,

instead of the whole of some parcelles; from whence, no doubt, the amazing multiplication of these little patches in many parts of France.

This evil, while it would not exist to any very material extent except under the peculiar French law of inheritance, is not inevitable even under that law. The enormous extent of sales of land, amounting in ten years to a fourth part of the landed property of France, are a clear proof that in general the adjustment of inheritances is not effected by a subdivision of the land, but by sale : which, it needs scarcely be remarked, does not necessarily imply parting with the land, there being nothing to hinder the heirs themselves from becoming the purchasers. We have no doubt it would be found that this rational mode of executing the law is tending more and more to become universal. To hasten the undoing of the mischief which has been already done, the Government has been often urged (in some instances by Councils-General of Departments) to propose a law authorising the consolidation of landed properties by a general valuation and exchange of allotments, in every commune in which the majority of the proprietors may apply for it; and unless the evil is seen to be correcting itself by a spontaneous process, nothing, we should think, can long prevent the adoption of so salutary an expedient.

That French agriculture, and the condition of the peasant population, are injuriously affected by this sort of morcellement, is so far true, that it must considerably retard the improvement which might otherwise be expected, and which, in spite of all hindrances, does even now, to a great extent, take place. More than this we cannot admit. There are conclusive proofs of great and rapid improvement in some parts of France, and M. Rubichon and his reviewer have no evidence whatever of retrogression in any.

They produce tables of the average amount of different kinds of food consumed by the population; also tables of the number of cattle, the amount of produce per hectare of the different kinds of cultivation, &c., calculated from the official documents. These estimates, assuming their correctness (which, so far as that quality is attainable, we generally see no reason to discredit), are indicative, doubtless, of a low and backward state. But statistics are only evidence of the present. Where are the statistics of the past? That the agriculture of a great part of France is rude and imperfect is known to all Europe; but that it ever was better, is an assertion

opposed to all evidence, and we shall not take M. Rubichon's word for it, no more than for the notion that the food and general condition of the mass of the people has been deteriorating from the time of Louis XIV.*, if not earlier. At this last proposition we cannot repress our wonder. In the reign of Louis XIV., Marshal Vauban, a great authority with all who are themselves authorities, and even with M. Rubichon, estimated that one-tenth of the population of France were beggars, and five of the remaining nine-tenths little above beggary. In the same reign, Labruyère claimed credit for apprising the salons of Paris that a strange nondescript sort of animals, who might be seen in the fields, and were much addicted to grubbing in the earth, were, though nobody would suppose it, a kind of men. Some readers may remember the picture drawn by the old Marquis Mirabeau of the rural population in the middle of the eighteenth century; nor was Arthur Young's, at the opening of the Revolution, much more favourable. Compare this with any authentic account, or with the testimony of any observant resident or traveller, respecting their condition now. M. Rubichon's statistics comprise no returns of the rate of wages. We are quite willing that our case should rest upon the result of an inquiry into that one point.

As for agriculture, when it is recollected that, at the beginning of this century, in the greater part of Frauce the culture of artificial grasses might be said to be unknown, and that the course of cultivation consisted solely of grain crops and fallows, it will be difficult to make us believe that, even in the most backward parts of the country, there has not been a considerable improvement from so miserable a level.

* It did deteriorate in the early part of the reign of Louis XIV, not because the peasants bought land, but because they were compelled to sell it. "Au moment" says Michelet (Le Peuple, ch. 1), "où nos ministres Italiens, un Mazarin, un Emeri, doublaient les taxes, les nobles qui remplissaient la cour obtinrent aisément d'être exemptés, de sorte que le fardeau double tomba d'aplomb sur les épaules des faibles et des pauvres, qui furent bien obligés de vendre ou donner cette terre à peine acquise, et de redevenir des mercenaires, fermiers, métayers, journaliers.... Je prie et je supplie ceux qui nous font des lois ou les appliquent, de lire le détail de la funeste réaction de Mazarin et de Louis XIV dans les pages pleines d'indignation et de douleur où l'a consignée un grand citoyen, Pesant de Boisguillebert, réimprimé recemment dans la Collection des Economistes. Puisse cette histoire les avertir dans un moment où diverses influences travaillent à l'envi pour arrêter l'œuvre capitale de la France, l'acquisition de la terre par le travailleur."

The blind zeal with which M. Rubichon presses everything into the service of his theory, in which he is faithfully echoed by his reviewer, makes them lay great stress upon the increase of roots, and other inferior kinds of culture, as a proof that the population is sinking to an inferior kind of nutriment; as if the same thing was not happening in England; as if it was not a necessary condition of an improved rotation of crops, that other cultures should increase in a greater proportion than grain culture, and even at the expense, in some degree, of the inferior kinds of grain.

We have admitted, and again admit, the unsatisfactory state of cultivation on a very great portion of the soil of France; but would it be any better if the estates were large? Is it any better now on the large estates? When M. Rubichon and his reviewer talk of the small properties as "creating a new Ireland in France," his own pages make it known that the large properties, in the backward parts of France, are already an Ireland, in the very worst feature of Irish landed mismanagement, the system of middlemen. It is a general practice, according to M. de Châteauvieux, with the great proprietors of the central departments, to let their land en bloc to a middleman, usually an attorney or a notary, who sublets it in small portions on the métayer system, and is not only, as in Ireland, the hardest and most grasping of landlords, but having only a temporary tenure, and being no agriculturist, of course expends nothing in improvements. Of fifty-seven millions of acres cultivated by tenants, twenty-one millions only are held by farmers at fixed rents, and thirty-six millions on the métayer tenure; which in France implies all the defects with very few of the advantages of proprietary cultivation; the only exceptions being La Vendée and a few of the adjoining departments, where the large proprietors are resident, a primitive relationship subsists between them and their tenants, and the métayers have in general, as in Tuscany, a virtual fixity of tenure. We do not believe it will be found in any part of France that the small properties are under a bad agriculture, and the large properties under a good one. They are both bad, or both good. Where large farms exist and are well cultivated, the small properties also are well managed and prosperous.

And this brings us to the principal cause, both now and formerly, of the unimproved agriculture and scanty application of

capital to the soil of France. This is, the exclusive taste of the wealthy and middle classes for town life and town pursuits, combined with the general want of enterprise of the French nation with respect to industrial improvements. It is truly, though epigrammatically, said by M. Rubichon, that the Frenchman, generally, knows but one way of getting rich; namely, thrift. He does not understand sowing money freely to reap it largely. This is the true cause why, when large properties are sold, they bring the greatest price by being much subdivided. The peasants, thanks to the Revolution, to the small properties, and to their own unparalleled prudence, are able to purchase land, and their savings are the only part of the wealth of the country which takes that direction. We are often told, that it does not answer to capitalists to buy land at the extravagant price which the passion of the peasantry for land induces them to give, amounting often to forty years' purchase. It does not answer to pay that price in order to live idly on the rent in Paris, or the large provincial towns. But if there was one particle of the spirit of agricultural improvement in the owners of the monied wealth which is so largely increasing in the manufacturing and commercial districts, few speculations would be more profitable than to buy land in many fertile aud ill-cultivated parts of France, at even more than forty years' purchase of its wretchedly low rental, which would soon be doubled or trebled by the application of capital, with ordinary agricultural knowledge and enterprise. If the petite culture is half as wasteful and unprofitable as is pretended, the profit would be proportional of substituting la grande culture for it. The thing would soon be done if the love of industrial progress should ever supplant in the French mind the love of national glory, or if the desire of national glorification should take that direction. But with a people who dislike rural pursuits, and in the pursuit of money-getting prefer the beaten ways, there can be no other farming than peasant farming.

III.

THE cheval de bataille of M. Rubichon and his English followers against the petite propriété, is the cattle question; not without cause, since on this subject they have an indisputable basis of fact, however inadequate to sustain the superstructure they have raised

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