management of the land. If a partition is demanded, it must be made; a will which leaves to each heir a separate compact estate, however equitable the division, is as invalid as one that leaves to one coheir the land, to another the equivalent in personalty. The effect of this arbitrary creation of a plurality of owners is very often to waste the estate in litigation, or force the land on the market, when it either ruins the owners by producing too little or their neighbours by producing too much. It divides the estate into such minute strips that there is not space to employ a full-sized spade. A turn of the plough on the wrong side for a single season robs one man of his property or doubles that of his neighbour. Trespasses are necessarily frequent, and behind them follows litigation. Revolutionary legislation has added fourfold to the truth of the feudal maxim, 'Qui terre a, guerre a.' It splits up the estate into separate and often distant plots, so that each individual proprietor owns several scattered parcels. Hence arise a loss of productive soil by the number of fences and unprofitable roads, a waste of time, and an increase of expense by the necessity of carrying implements, crops, and manure from point to point. Thus subdivided, district properties are so interlaced that agricultural progress is checked, and cultivation reduced to one level, and that level the lowest. To such a length is pulverisation carried, that a peasant proprietor is ruined by a single adverse season. His capital is exhausted, and he sinks from a landowner into a hired labourer. Between 1826 and 1835, for instance, half the landed properties in the kingdom changed hands; and half of these changes were due not to gifts or inheritances, but to sales, forfeitures, or exchanges. The land thus passes rapidly from hand to hand; it is terre volante; immoveable property circulates more frequently than moveable; it is invested in as a speculation; it is treated almost as if it were stock to be bought and sold on 'change. Again, the tendency of a peasant proprietary is to throw a country back among the rudiments of civilisation. Co-operation and division of labour cease. The peasant tries to produce all that he wants upon his farm; to have a plot for his vineyard or apple orchard, a piece of arable for breadstuff, a meadow for his cow. It cuts him to the heart to buy. Consequently he often ploughs up land which is best suited by nature for pasture, and thus wastes the natural advantages of the soil or climate. Lastly, it may be urged that compulsory division leaves no adequate authority, and no clearsighted public interests. In a moun

tainous district, for instance, like the neighbourhood of Embrun, it is no one's business to clear out watercourses, and a single goat may cause an inundation. Mountain torrents strew the plains with pebbles spreading outwards like a fan, and threatening to convert an Arabia Felix into an Arabia Petræa. The evil is to some extent met in such cases by State interference, and by the powers vested in the Préfet, under certain circumstances, to form a syndicate for works of drainage, irrigation, and protection against floods.

Other arguments may be urged on the score of agriculture against the system; but we do not consider them established. It is, for instance, said that the peasant proprietor is an obstacle to high farming. He cannot keep the best stock; he has not land enough for sheep; he cannot afford to grow wheat. But the soil of France, like that of England, is no longer young; and the question is whether intensive farming is not the best method by which an old country can supplement the supplies it draws from virgin soils-in other words, whether the French peasant proprietor who with unremitting toil and infinite patience concentrates his energies on agricultural produce, which is naturally protected by its rapidly perishable nature, is not steering a better course than the tenant farmer who competes with new countries in the production of corn, beef, and wool. Of most of the troubles which beset tenant farmers, peasant proprietors have no experience. Farms of any size are difficult to let, especially if they range above 150 acres. But the small farmer lives by his butter, his market garden, and his basse-cour. His eggs are collected by hucksters or cocotiers who carry them to the central depôts to be packed. From an English point of view, the subdivision of land is excessive; but we have not the same variety of soil, climate, and crops, which complicate the agricultural question in France.

But it is urged that, though the partage forcé may not yet pulverise the land, it must do so eventually; and that then the impoverished peasant proprietor will find that there are no employers of labour, but only small owners as poor and miserable as himself. In theory, this result seems inevitable; in practice, it does not necessarily follow. The outcry against small properties had commenced twenty years before the revolution; to them agricultural societies then attributed the backward condition of farming. The sale of large corporate and private estates, and the distribution of common lands among the commoners, seemed to intensify the evils of a system which the partage forcé perpetuated. It

was not till after the Restoration that compulsory subdivision began to be dreaded. Previously pulverisation was checked by foreign wars; civil law made a man a landowner, military law marched him off to Austerlitz or Borodino. Yet equal partition had already begun to produce some bad results, for in 1826 the Government issued a manifesto offering special facilities and reduced fees to all landowners who wished to surrender their estates through inability to pay the land tax of 10d. an acre on their estates. Since that period, however, the peasant has not merely retained, but extended his hold upon the land; he has saved money, and, except in rare instances, has checked pulverisation au point,' to use the words of Benjamin Constant, who foretold the fact, au delà duquel il deviendrait funeste.' How has he achieved these results?

6

The peasant has extended his hold upon the land mainly at the expense of middle-sized estates, which are too large to be worked by the labour of the proprietor and his family, and become unprofitable if tilled by hired labour. Large estates have for the most part remained intact. French landlords rarely have the bulk of their property in land, and family arrangements are easily effected among the rich. The peasant has also saved money. He has made his small holding pay because he does not hire labour, or grow corn, or depend upon wool. He is a market gardener, a vinedresser, a florist, a dairyman, and a poulterer. He grows certain special crops which require incessant and minute attention, for which the soil and climate of the country offer him facilities. He rears little or no stock. He feeds calves for the veal market; he either breeds or breaks in mules and horses; he sells his colts as soon as they are weaned, or at two and a half years old; and this division of labour places a profitable industry within the reach of the small peasant owner. Lastly, he has avoided, except in cases which scarcely affect the question of farming, the pulverisation of the land. Parcels have recently increased very slowly, and within the last three or four years they have positively decreased. This seems to show that the peasant is not so hungry for land as to buy it when its produce is comparatively valueless, or to split it up into liliputian estates which cannot be tilled at a profit. Often the peasant is attracted away from the land by high wages or the delight of town life; he is not unwilling to sell his land and seek his fortune in trade. In Normandy he preserves his estate intact by instinctively practising the principles of Malthus, of whom he has never heard. In the

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north several small proprietors throw their land together and let it as a single farm to one of their number or to a stranger, under whom they work for wages. Sometimes one of the coheirs carries on the farm, paying rent to his brother and sister, or the two latter abstain from marriage and live under his roof, working as hired labourers. Difficulties are doubtless experienced when partitions of land are insisted upon, which result in numbers of interlaced plots belonging to different owners. But exchanges are more frequent since these partitions are no longer taxed as double sales, and the Government might do still more for their encouragement. Without infringing upon the essential principles of the partage forcé, it would be possible to permit the head of a family to leave his personalty to one coheir and his realty to another, provided that they were of equal value, or to render exchanges compulsory for the consolidation of the various estates on the demand of twothirds of the owners.

So long as peasant owners are able to supplement their agricultural gains by industrial wages, they are especially prosperous. Thus the weavers of Elboeuf, the ironworkers of Conches, the cotton-stuff workers of the valley of the Andelle are not only artisans, but farmers, market gardeners, or florists; in the summer they are harvesters or haymakers. It is this combination of agriculture with manufacture which constitutes an important element in the happiness of Normandy. So again, Saumur has its enamel factories, Tours its silk fabrics, Le Mans its tinned vegetables, Angers its slate quarries, Cholet its cheap handkerchiefs, Laval its sacking and sailcloth, and in all these cases the artisan is also a peasant proprietor. In Vaucluse numerous industrial enterprises employ men who also possess small plots of land, such as madder, flour, and oil mills, silk spinning, brick and tile yards, and limekilns. So also the people of the Pas de Calais and the Somme are largely employed in local manufactures which supplement their agricultural earnings. So also in Franche-Comté the peasants are turners, lapidaries, electro-platers, wood-carvers, and spectacle-makers. The same remark holds good of the Nord with its high farming and dense population. It must be remembered, as pointed out at the outset, that manufacturers are less concentrated in towns than they are in England. If there are no manufacturing industries in the locality, peasant proprietors like the Auvergnat, the Limousin, or the Nivernais, migrate in search of work for nine months of the year.

In other districts the small landowners work alternately for one another. Thus in the Basses-Alpes they eke out their profits by moneta forestiere; in Hérault they are day labourers who till their own plots of land, or, as their patois expresses it, font l'impéraou out of working hours; in HautesPyrénées they hire themselves out for daily wages; in Tarnet-Garonne the pagés, as the peasants are called, work in harvest times as estivandiers and solatiers.

The peasant proprietor has suffered comparatively little by agricultural depression. Employing no hired labour, and growing corn only for his own consumption, he has not been, and hardly can be, affected by foreign competition. But for the tenant farmer the agricultural crisis is hardly less serious in France than it is in England. The proof lies on side. Forced sales of stock and rural bankruptcies are nnmerous; disputes are rife respecting claims to unexhausted improvements; farms are difficult to let, rents are falling, population migrates into the towns, land decreases in value. It no longer pays to grow wheat; flock masters get nothing for their wool; American pork undersells French produce; the florist of Angers complains of his Belgian rival; the madder of Vaucluse is beaten out of the field by indigo. Wages are rising in a falling market; labour is not only scarce and dear, but it has deteriorated in quality. The younger generation is not, it is said, like the old; lads go off to seek fortunes in towns, or cannot endure, after the gaiety of barrack life, the monotony of the country. Girls will not work like their mothers, but become dressmakers or shopgirls. In France, as in England, politico-economical questions are chained to the car of party politics; no one dares to investigate the principles which regulate commercial dealings. In France, as well as in England, a new privileged class has been created, that of the rentier, who escapes the taxation which crushes the agriculturist. As in England, so in France, through railway rates are said to favour the foreigner; and in both countries the cry grows louder that the cheapest loaf becomes the dearest when no one has money to buy it. If French tenant farmers have suffered less than their English brethren, it is because the land has never been called upon to produce two gentlemen's incomes, and because large employers of labour are never ashamed of the blouse and the sabot.

It is the tenant farmer renting a large farm, employing hired labour, and growing corn and beef for sale and not for home consumption, who has suffered by agricultural depres