peasant in his desire to add to the little property hoarc 

 and then mortgages his property to buy more, and is ofter 

 thus prevented from cultivating what he has to the best 

 advantage. 1 Speak to a French peasant proprietor, and 

 I have spoken to many of them, and he will at once tell 

 you of the hardness of his lot, of the pinching and 

 scraping, which is necessary to keep the little land together, 

 and of the constant anxiety of his life/ 



It also appears that at the present moment the peasant 

 proprietor is declining in numbers in France. M. Meline, 

 the leader of the agricultural party, who was Minister of 

 Agriculture from 1883 to 1885, and for a brief moment 

 Prime Minister in 1896, has lately pointed out this fact 

 in his book the Return to the Land 2 ; and M. Bled says 

 that in thousands of parishes the population has been 

 reduced by one half since 1850, and that moderate-sized 

 properties are increasing at the expense of the small. 3 

 'They have quitted the land,' says M. Meline, 'not 

 because of its failure to provide them with the means of 

 existence, but because their life was too laborious and 

 imposed on them too many privations, while the factory 

 gave them higher wages with less tiring work and more 

 regular hours'; because of the dreariness of the country 

 and the fascination of the town, a fascination acquired, 

 it is said, often by the young conscript ; and many of you 

 will remember that this is the burden of M. Rene Bazin's 

 novel, ' La Terre qui meurt/ 



M. Jacques Dumas, the procureur of Rethel, in the 

 department of the Ardennes, has attempted in an article in 

 the March number of the Econ. Journal to dispute this fact. 



1 Gamier, Hist, of the English Landed Interest, p. 152, quoting 

 from Leconteux, Journal d'agriculture. 



8 Meline, Eeturn to the Land, translated, pp. 85, 90. 

 Revue des Deux Mondes, Dec. 1904. 



