igo LAND REFORM 



clared that small cultivators must go on without 

 money or instruction, that they would be unable to 

 adopt improvements, and that their operations would 

 leave no surplus products. The English system, on 

 the contrary, was held to be more profitable, more 

 economical in the matter of labour, and more calcu- 

 lated to secure a larger surplus yield for the use of 

 the community. The social side of the question 

 was not much considered. 



These objectors ventured upon the most positive 

 foretellings as to the ruinous effect which the appli- 

 cation of the Civil Code would ultimately have on 

 the agriculture of France. It was predicted that 

 in "fifty years the land of France would become 

 a pauper warren." McCulloch wrote :^ " The law is 

 radically bad and bids fair in no lengthened period to 

 reduce the agriculturists of France to a condition 

 little, if at all, better than those of Ireland." 



In 1893, when more than the "fifty years" had 

 passed away, the president of the oldest and largest 

 agricultural society in France, in his address at the 

 annual meeting, dealt specially with these predictions. 

 He referred by name to some of these British econo- 

 mists, and showed how completely their prophecies 

 had been falsified. It was the labourer in England, 

 he said, who had been driven off the land to seek 

 other employment or to emigrate, while the French 

 peasant remained on his own holding of land, "which 

 he made fertile by stubborn industry, and on which 

 he lived happy and free." " The report," he said, 

 "will show you that the cultivator is as free as the 

 soil he cultivates ; the rural labourer is well fed, well 

 housed, and well clad, ... It will show you how 



* McCuUoch's " Principles of Political Economy." 



