THE QUESTION OF WHEAT. 7 



M. Cliarles Lesage proves that when wheat paid an import duty 

 of three francs, the Frenchman paid three francs seventy centimes 

 more on his wheat than did his neighbor of England ; and when the 

 duty was raised to five francs, the price of wheat in France was again 

 six francs ten centimes higher than in England. " Thus the three- 

 franc duty cost the country 300,000,000, and the five-franc duty 

 500,000,000, while it brought in 60,000,000 only to the treasury." * 

 In a country where the cost of government is advancing by leaps and 

 bounds, and the population is stationary or nearly so, the question of 

 additional burdens of indirect taxation is a serious one for the legis- 

 lator. But this form of taxation is one of the simplest and readiest 

 means of offering encouragement to agriculture through a restric- 

 tion of foreign competition, and the remarkable stability of wheat 

 area in France is at once proof of the conservative qualities of the 

 peasant and the general distribution of wheat cultivation throughout 

 the country. Of the eighty-seven departments into which France 

 is divided only four produced more than 2,500,000 hectolitres of 

 wheat. Reporting in 1896, the official representative of the agricul- 

 tural districts complacently remarked that the home crop was about 

 equal to the home consumption — a complacency rudely disturbed in 

 1897, when large importations became necessary. 



France is an excellent example of a combination of circumstances 

 favoring the culture of wheat in the face of unfavorable conditions. 

 Wheat is a necessity, and is grown everywhere as a usual and almost 

 necessary crop, apart from its commercial aspect. The farmer puts 

 down each year a certain amount of land under wheat for his own 

 consumption, and would continue to do so even if it happened (a 

 most unlikely supposition) that wheat should sell for one third its 

 present price. "With this personal and necessary crop the farmer 

 obtains food, a stock for seed, and usually a small surplus for sale, 

 even from the smallest of wheat farms. It has occurred many times 

 that a slightly higher price for wheat has called out unexpectedly 

 large quantities from the hands of the small farmers of France, quan- 

 tities that have been saved through indifference to sales or through 

 supposed necessities, .now set aside by the chance of reaping a profit. 

 And what has happened before will happen again among so thrifty a 

 nation of land cultivators as are the French. 



In addition to this necessity for growing wheat the division of 

 land must be counted as a favoring factor. Recent returns on this 

 head show that in France the total area under cultivation is 49,561,- 

 861 hectares, divided into 5,672,000 plots or farms. Even on a 

 general average this area and division will afford a small farm to 

 each holder, one suited to intensive operations only. But nearly 



* Economic Journal, September, 1896. 



