INTRODUCTION. 43 



to be found in the price of wine. On this point, 

 however, important as it is to the question, I lay 

 no stress. We live in an age when mind is suc- 

 cessfully opposed to matter, and a country where 

 thews and sinews are supplanted by the powers 

 of labour-saving machinery. It is on the differ- 

 ent mode, therefore, of applying the remedy, as 

 suited to the sparse population of our country, 

 that we must rely to overcome the objection. 



In many parts of the wine countries of Europe, 

 (and it is peculiarly so in Switzerland) a dense 

 population is crowded into such narrow limits, 

 that the agriculture of the country but barely af- 

 fords them the plainest necessaries of life. The 

 price of grain, corresponding with the demand 

 for it, is high ; and as a consequence, the labour 

 of man is cheaper than the labour of beast. 



As it is a settled principle of agricultural tactics 

 with the Swiss farmer, to keep no animals not 

 necessary to the business of his farm, resource is 

 had to every means to avoid the support of such 

 expensive members of the agricultural family. 

 Nor in fact is it necessary. The revolutions of 

 the country have broken up the ancient feudal 

 tenures, and divided the lands of the great seig- 

 niories among the people. In a country where 

 no right of primogeniture exists, and where an 

 equal division of property of the parent among 

 his children, forms, as with us, the basis of here- 

 ditary descent, the natural sub-division of pro- 

 perty supersedes the necessity of an agrarian law. 

 The possessor, therefore, of twenty acres, is an 

 important member of the commune of which he 

 is the bourgeois, and courtesy not unfrequently 



