354 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



chestnuts and other ornamented trees, furnishes a delightful 

 place for recreation. 



Nearly every other man one meets is a police officer or a 

 soldier, or some other government employee. Little liberty, it 

 seems to me, is left to the people ; the preachers, the teachers, 

 the municipal officers, and all those who exercise any authority, 

 are appointed, I believe, exclusively by the government. There 

 is, therefore, a great gulf between prince and peasant. But 

 an effijrt has been made to attach the people to the government 

 by throwing every facility for the acquisition of real property 

 in their way, by the subdivision of landed estates. 



France seems to have set the example in the minute sub- 

 division of lands, a result, in part, of the reaction which took 

 place at the period of the great Revolution of 1789, when a law 

 was enacted which led to the sale of the immense estates of the 

 feudal nobility as national property, and which were soon 

 parcelled out into small estates. Great encouragement has 

 ever since been given to the poorer cultivators of the soil, the 

 peasantry, to become owners of land, and hence has resulted an 

 almost universal desire for such ownership. They have liter- 

 ally run the system into the ground, and infinitesimal strips of 

 earth are now owned and cultivated as farms by those who have 

 to mortgage the little land they own to keep their heads above 

 the surface of the soil they cling to with so much tenacity. 

 The number of these land-owners, at the present time, in 

 France, is said to be over eleven millions, while the number in 

 England and Wales is, perhaps, not more than two hundred 

 and fifty thousand. 



France, therefore, may be considered as the type of this 

 system of small holdings, which lias become rather common on 

 tt:e continent, as England is the type of the opposite system, 

 that of laigc holdings. Minute division, or subdivision, 

 obtaiiis in the one, immense aggregation in the other. Curious 

 as it ,E.Aay seem, both may bo traced to the same source, the 

 Frcncii ;Revolution, for before the war between England and 

 France the number of small land-holders in the former country 

 was very great, vastly greater tlian at the present time, and 

 they formed a class possessing very great social and political 

 influence. Under them the land was but poorly cultivated. 

 They were not progressive, but followed in the track of their 



