430 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



which in point of tenure are as defective as our own. A good law 

 of transfer corrects, as we have seen, a defective law of succession, 

 and it also goes far to remedy defective laws and customs of tenure. 

 It is, moreover, peasant proprietorship alone that prevents the ques- 

 tions of both tenure and landed property from assuming the for- 

 midable shape on the Continent which they do already in Ireland, 

 and will do erelong in England. The report of the ejiqiiete agricole 

 suggests additional powers of lease in the case of husbands owning 

 in right of their wives, and of guardians, and, again, a reduction 

 of the duty on leases, with, moreover, a legal presumption of a 

 lease for twelve years in the absence of a written one. But such 

 measures would give about as much satisfaction, and go as far 

 towards allaying agrarian discontent in France as they would in 

 Ireland, were there not a large diffusion of landed proprietorship, 

 and a facility for both tenants and labourers of passing from that 

 status to the status of proprietor, or of combining both. 



It is fortunate for France not only that peasant proprietorship 

 already exists on a great scale, but that the tendency of the eco- 

 nomic progress of the country, as already shown, is to substitute 

 more and more cultivation by peasant proprietors for cultivation 

 by tenants ; and to give more and more to those who remain 

 tenants or labourers the position and sentiments also of proprie- 

 tors. The increasing demand for, and rising prices of, the prod- 

 uce of la petite ciilticre make it more and more a profitable 

 investment of the peasant's savings and labour ; and those very 

 rising prices, and the rising wages, which also follow the develop- 

 ment of the resources of the country, put both the small tenant 

 and the labourer in a condition to become buyers in the land 

 market. All improvements in the law of property, and in fiscal 

 legislation respecting it, will tend in the same direction, since 

 the costs attending changes of ownership and exchanges of land 

 fall heavier on small than on large properties. All the highest 

 agronomic authorities in France, instead of objecting to the in- 

 creasing subdivision of landed property, are urgent for the re- 

 moval of all legal impediments to its division, as well as those 

 which lay disproportionate cost on its acquisition in small portions, 

 as in those which retain it in common ownership. 



