IN FRANCE 33 



are attained. Furrow draining, stall feeding all summer, liquid manures, are 

 universal in the husbandry of the small farms of Flanders, Lombardy, Switzer- 

 land. Our most improving districts under large farms are but beginning to 

 adopt them. Dairy husbandry, even, and the manufacture of the largest 

 cheeses by the cooperation of many small farmers, the mutual assurance of 

 property against fire and hail storms, by the cooperation of small farmers 

 the most scientific and expensive of all agricultural operations in modern times, 

 the manufacture of beet sugar the supply of the European markets with flax 

 and hemp, by the husbandry of small farmers the abundance of legumes, 

 fruits, poultry, in the usual diet even of the lowest classes abroad, and the 

 total want of such variety at the tables even of our middle classes, and this 

 variety and abundance essentially connected with the husbandry of small 

 farmers all these are features in the occupation of a country by small pro- 

 prietor-farmers, which must make the inquirer pause before he admits the 

 dogma of our land doctors at home, that large farms worked by hired labor 

 and great capital can alone bring out the greatest productiveness of the soil, 

 and furnish the greatest supply of the necessaries and conveniences of life to 

 the inhabitants of a country." 



In France. The British writer of over a century ago who was 

 the warmest advocate of large farms, Arthur Young, traveled 

 over nearly the whole of France. Even at that day France was 

 known as the land of small farms, due to the repeated subdivisions 

 of the land. Yet inveterate enemy of small farms as Young was, 

 he found remarkable evidence of excellent cultivation in the little 

 fields of France in the years 1787, 1788 and 1789. In his "Travels 

 in France" we read, for instance, the following: 



"Walk to Rossendal, where M. le Brun has an improvement on the Dunes, 

 which he very obligingly showed me. Between the town and that place is a 

 great number of neat little houses, built each with its garden, and one or two 

 fields enclosed, of most wretched blowing dune sand, naturally as white as 

 snow, but improved by industry. The magic of property turns sand to gold. 

 . . . From Gauge, to the mountain of rough ground which I crossed, the ride 

 has been the most interesting which I have taken in France; the efforts of 

 industry the most vigorous; the animation the most lively. An activity has 

 been here, that has swept away all difficulties before it, and clothed the very 

 rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause; 

 the enjoyment of property must have done it. Give a man the secure posses- 

 sion of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' 

 lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert . . . Take the road to 

 Moneng, and come presently to a scene which was so new to me in France, 

 that I could hardly believe my own eyes. A succession of many well-built, 

 tight, and comfortable farming cottages built of stone and covered with tiles; 

 each having its little garden, inclosed by clipt thorn-hedges, with plenty of 

 peach and other fruit trees, some fine oaks scattered in the hedges, and young 

 trees nursed up with so much care, that nothing but the fostering attention 

 of the owner could effect anything like it. To every house belongs a farm, 

 perfectly well enclosed, with grass borders mown and neatly kept around the 

 corn fields, with gates to pass from one enclosure to another There are some 

 parts of England (where small yeomen still remain) that resemble this country 

 of Beam ; but we have very little that is equal to what I have seen in this ride 

 of twelve miles from Pau to Moneng. It is all in the hands of little proprietors, 

 without the farms being so small as to occasion a vicious and miserable popu- 

 lation. An air of neatness, warmth and comfort breathes over the whole, 

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