48 N. H. STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



"subsist on black bread and roots. They save other men 

 "the labor of ploughing and sowing and harvesting, and 

 "therefore are entitled to some share of the bread they 

 "have sown." A later writer, (Courier) remarks that in 

 this extract La Bruycre was speaking of the more fortu- 

 nate class of peasants, those merely who were blessed with 

 bread though black, and the opportunity to earn it, and 

 these, he adds, were the fewest. 



Such, making some allowance for rhetorical exaggera- 

 tion, were the farmers of France, at the period when your 

 enlightened ancestors were laying the first foundations of 

 our mighty empire on the Atlantic coast of New England. 

 Now, however, the tillers of French soil, as in the northern 

 United States, know that they constitute the weightiest 

 element in the State, and they are hourly making .them- 

 selves more and more felt in the political action of their 

 government. This consciousness of the importance and 

 the responsibilities of their position, and their consequent 

 identification with the power and glory of France, is one 

 of the main reasons why so few Frenchmen emigrate to 

 the New World, and it serves to explain how in the late 

 destructive war, there was comparatively little difliculty in 

 recruiting the French army with men whose rural life had 

 given them the best physical training, and the proper moral 

 qualities to form a spirited and cflicient soldiery. 



In Great Britain, on the contrary, the accumulation of 

 the real estate of the island in the hands of a comparative- 

 ly small number of proprietors, has JDroduced efl'ects quite 

 oppobite to those which I have just described as existing 

 in France. The causes of this accumulation I cannot hero 

 discuss in detail, but I may mention in general that they 

 may l)c found, as respects northern Scotland, in the aboli- 

 tion of the patriarchal system of the Uighlands, by which 

 the chief was considered as holding his lands in trust for 

 the clan ; and elsewhere in the operation of the law of 

 primogeniture and entail, the great increase of capital from 



