432 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



western Europe. Nevertheless the French communal lands, 

 even as they are, give the French peasantry an advantage which 

 the British peasant has been deprived of ; and they also provide 

 a fund for the future augmentation of the possessions of the 

 French peasantry, to which there is nothing now corresponding 

 in England. 



It is not, however, the object of the present writer to compare 

 the land system of France to that of Great Britain. Those who 

 institute such a comparison will remember that it would be in a 

 great measure imperfect and even delusive if confined to a survey 

 of the present state of agriculture and of the peasantry of France 

 forward already as is the former, happy as is the latter, in 

 many parts of that country. The history of the two countries, the 

 comparative state of their agriculture and peasantry a hundred 

 years ago, as well as now, must be taken into account. France 

 has had only three-quarters of a century of anything like liberty, 

 and less than half a century of tranquillity and industrial life. 

 Nor in any such comparison should the respective effects of the 

 land systems of the two countries on the town as well as on the 

 country be overlooked. Whoever reflects what the French rural 

 population would be, on the one hand, under a land system like 

 that of Ireland, or even England ; and what its town population 

 would be, on the other, if instead of being a third it were more 

 than a half of the whole nation, and if instead of having a po- 

 litical counterpoise in the country it found there only greater 

 political ferment and discontent than its own, must surely pro- 

 nounce that the land system of France is not only the salvation 

 of that country itself, but one of the principal securities for the 

 tranquillity and economic progress of Europe. 



