| » 
( 2 ) 
be dissembled that her husbandry has many defects : 
1. A supposed resemblance between the earth and 
animals, gave rise to fallows: because men and bor- 
ses required repose after Jabor, it was supposed that 
after cropping, the earth also required it. Faithful 
io this absurd analogy, the French landlord binds 
down his tenant by lease, not to crop the soil more 
than three years out of four, which in effect is to 
consign to barrenness or weeds one fourth of the 
whole arable land of France yearly ! | 
2. There is not a sufficiently fixed, or steady pro 
portion, between arable and pasture land. ‘The pro- 
duction of grain is the great object of culture—often 
with too little regard to the nature of the soil, and 
generally without any to its improvements. “ Where 
pasturage is scanty, where natural meadows are bad, 
where artificial are rare, and root husbandry little 
extended, cattle cannot be either numerous or well 
conditioned ; and as without these there can be no 
manure, sO Without manure there can be no abun- 
dance.”’(1) | 
3. The land is generally worked by farmers, 
hired for that purpose, or by renters on short leases ; 
which in neither case betters the condition of the soil ; 
the one having no interest in improvements, and the 
ee et 
of corvee, (labor performed by tenants for landlords)—of taxes or rents, and of 
rights of commonage—was among these effects; and if to these we add the division 
of the great landed estates of the nobility and clergy, there can no longer be any 
scepticism on this point. No truth is better established than the advantage of smai/ 
farms over great, so far as thé public is concerned. ‘The Roman latifundia (military 
grants) destroyed Roman agriculture, 
Q) Herbin’s Statistique general de la France, vol. i. introduction. 
