412 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



authority of a statement made by an unofficial member of the 

 House of Commons during a debate a figure which has often 

 since been reproduced in England on the authority of M. de 

 Lavergne himself namely, that there are two hundred and 

 fifty thousand owners of land in this country ; although it ought 

 to be noticed that there is reason to believe an error respecting 

 the meaning of the technical term "freeholders" was involved 

 in this calculation, and, moreover, that it includes a number 

 of suburban freeholds, and by consequence an urban, not a 

 rural, class of proprietors, far less actual cultivators of land of 

 their own. 



Four millions of landowners cultivating the soil of a territory 

 only one-third larger than Great Britain may probably appear 

 to minds familiar only with the idea of great estates and large 

 farms almost a reductio ad absurdum of the land system of the 

 French. Those, on the other hand, who have studied the con- 

 dition of the French cultivators not merely in books, but in 

 their own country, and who have witnessed the improvements 

 which have taken place in it and in their cultivation year after 

 year, will probably regard the number with a feeling of satisfac- 

 tion. One thing, at least, is established by it, that property in 

 land is in France a national possession ; that the territory of the 

 nation belongs to the nation, and that no national revolution can 

 take place for the destruction of private property. 



But the inquiry proper to the present pages leads us to 

 examine, in the first place, the causes of so wide a distribution 

 of landed property in France, and, secondly, its economic rather 

 than its political effects. Its economic effects will prove on ex- 

 amination to be in fact its principal cause. The notion commonly 

 entertained in England appears, however, to be that, originating 

 in the confiscations of the French Revolution, the subdivision of 

 the soil has been not only perpetuated but increased in a geo- 

 metrical progression by the law of succession established by the 

 Code Napoleon. That it did not originate with the Revolution, 

 and that an immense number of peasant properties existed in 

 France long prior to 1789, is indeed well known to all students 

 of French social historv ; and those who have not concerned 



