474 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



As long as England does not introduce security, publicity, 

 facility of exchange (in fine, free trade) into everything connected 

 with property in land, there will ever be an insuperable obstacle 

 to the establishment of an agrarian system in keeping with the 

 wants of modern society. A reform in this particular branch of 

 English law is, in my opinion, the most urgent of all. 



We have seen that much larger gross returns are everywhere 

 obtained from the land by small than by large farming. This is 

 certainly a great, but not the greatest, boon accruing from it. 



The larger the number of landowners is in a country, the more 

 free and independent citizens there are interested in the main- 

 tenance of public order. Property is the essential complement of 

 liberty. Without property man is not truly free. Whatever rights 

 the political constitution may confer upon him, so long as he is a 

 tenant he remains a dependent being. A free man politically, he 

 is socially but a bondsman. 



In Belgium most tenant-farmers enjoy both the municipal and 

 parliamentary franchise. But this right, so far from raising them 

 in the social scale, is but a source of mortification and humiliation 

 to them, for they are forced to vote according to the dictate of the 

 landlord, instead of following the dictates of their own inclinations 

 and convictions. How can they feel any attachment to a consti- 

 tution which, in conferring a new right, really at the same time 

 rivets a new chain on them ? The electoral franchise is but a 

 mockery and a snare to the cultivator without either proprietorship 

 or a long lease. 



It may be thought a matter for surprise that, in Flanders, 

 feelings hostile to social order nevertheless do not manifest them- 

 selves, and that agrarian outrages are never perpetrated as in 

 Ireland, although I think it certain that, in consequence of exces- 

 sive competitions, the Flemish farmer is much more ground down 

 by his landlord than the Irish tenant. The fact that in Flanders, 

 as in all countries in which landed property is distributed among 

 a large number of owners, the ideas called socialist : in the bad 



1 I think it is to be regretted that a disparaging meaning should attach to this 

 word. Are not those who devote themselves to social science, socialists? When, 

 in 1S4S. Proudhon was asked in the Committee of Inquiry, " What is socialism? " 



