METAYAGE 135 



Industry necessarily brings business men together to 

 some extent. Agriculture in itself holds the farmer 

 apart, and preserves him in lonely ignorance to be the 

 victim of the perambulating moneylender. To-day 

 more than 50 per cent of the independent agriculturists 

 of Germany are members of rural banks ; and another 

 10 per cent, chiefly the larger farmers, are members of 

 town banks. The non-co-operative agriculturist is 

 becoming the exception. The Raiffeisen banks are 

 thickest in the south-west of Germany, the home of the 

 small peasant proprietors. Indeed the change wrought 

 in many of these villages is nothing short of a revolution. 



METAYAGE 



Metayage, or in French legal phraseology le colonage 

 partiaire, is a system of letting agricultural land for 

 which the English language possesses no equivalent 

 term. It involves the payment of rent in kind, but 

 that alone does not constitute metayage. Produce-rents 

 may take two chief forms : the payment of a fixed 

 quantity, or the payment of a proportional quantity, 

 and the latter is the distinguishing characteristic of 

 metayage, the yield of the farm being divided in definite 

 proportions between owner and tenant, so that the 

 quantity accruing to each party varies from year to year. 



Originally and etymologically it was a division by 

 halves, and usually it remains so ; but practice now 

 varies, so that the share of the owner is sometimes as 

 low as one-third on inferior land, or even as high as 

 two-thirds on exceptionally fertile farms. Besides 

 produce-sharing, another essential feature of the system 

 is that it involves the associated action of owner and 

 tenant in the provision of the stock, for the former 

 generally provides half the movable capital in addition 

 to the land and permanent improvements, though here 

 again the proportions vary according to local custom 

 and the nature of the crop. 



