SOME ECONOMIC INTERESTS 139 



neglected, and which can be provided for only by varied efforts 

 of will and intelligence ? ' ' 



Small proprietorship is ''propitious to the moral virtues of 

 prudence, temperance, and self-control. ' ' Laborers are liable to 

 spend their entire wage. ' * The tendency of peasant proprietors, 

 and of those who hope to become proprietors, is to the contrary 

 extreme ; to take even too much 'thought for the morrow' " ; to be 

 penurious. Even among the pleasure-loving French people of 

 the agricultural sort ' ' the spirit of thrift is diffused through the 

 rural population in a manner most gratifying as a whole, and 

 which in individual instances errs rather on the side of excess 

 than defect." 



Mr. Mill further holds that small holdings would not interfere 

 with the desirable and much needed purpose on the part of the 

 workers to exercise prudence and restraint in the increase of 

 population. Some writers had held that peasant proprietors 

 would be likely to multiply up to the limits of food production 

 and thus force a minute subdivision of land. Mr. Mill believes 

 that without education and habituation into the exercise of pru- 

 dence the land proprietors, like other workers, would increase 

 in number up to the food limits. But that if indoctrinated like 

 their urban brothers they would exercise due restraint. 

 Furthermore, he marshals facts from Switzerland, Norway, 

 Prussia, and other continental countries to demonstrate that 

 peasant proprietorship not only did not evoke over-population 

 but rather checked it. 



Concluding his chapters on peasant proprietors he says : 



"As a result of this inquiry into the direct operation and in- 

 direct influences of peasant properties, I conceive it to be 

 established that there is no necessary connection between this 

 form of landed property and an imperfect state of the arts of 

 production ; that it is favorable in quite as many respects as it is 

 unfavorable, to the most effective use of the powers of the soil; 

 that no other existing state of agricultural economy has so bene- 

 ficial an effect on the industry, the intelligence, the frugality, and 

 prudence of the population, nor tends on the whole so much to 

 discourage an improvident increase of their numbers; and that 

 no existing state, therefore, is on the whole so favorable, both to 

 their rural and their physical welfare. Compared with the 



