394 History of the English Landed Interest. 



Here, then, we have side by side in this same country a 

 vigorous survival of a feudal tenure, and a large increase in 

 small proprietorship,^ neither of which owes its inception to 

 the French Revolution, though the latter may have been in- 

 debted for its large increase to that event. If, then, there are 

 any increased benefits derived from French agriculture and 

 attributable to the Revolution, the cause must be found in this 

 last circumstance. The evidence of Mr. James Howard, who 

 studied French agriculture in 1870,^ will not however admit 

 even of this contention. He tells us of French experts who 

 deplore " the demon of property in land " that has taken pos- 

 session of the small farmer,^ mainly because the interest of his 

 capital, if invested in ordinary securities, would enable him to 

 hire, on most remunerative terms, double the quantity of land 

 that he now holds as an owner, and cultivates at a loss. Apart 

 from the metayer system, in fact, not one satisfactory element 

 is discoverable in modern French agriculture. The labourer 

 is a slave toiling to live on a miserable pittance, the small 

 farmer works from sunrise to sunset, the large farms are 

 either stinted of their proper labour supply, or worked on a 

 clumsy co-operative system, leases afford no security of com- 

 pensation to an improving tenant, the fertility of the entire 

 soil is below the standard of that in England, and the agricul- 

 tural districts are fast becoming depopulated. Many thought- 

 ful French minds now begin to attribute all these ills to the 

 greater subdivision of land effected by the Code Napoleon, 

 which has thus opposed an effectual barrier to agricultural 

 advance.* 



But our English land reformers were not content with the 

 evidence derived from one single foreign precedent. It was 

 not, they said, only in the countries where the Code Napoleon 

 came into force that good results were palpable from the 

 abolition of feudal tenures. Early in the American revolu- 



^ In England only 17 per cent, of its population are agriculturists, and 

 less than one-sixth of these are proprietors. 



- Continental Farming and Peasantry. James Howard, M.P., 1870. 



' Journal d^ Agriculture Pratique. M. E. Leconteux. 



* Continental Farming and Peasanti^. James Howard, M.P., 1870. 



