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 allerTuraTopulatiorK 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 yeara 
 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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