68 RURAL ECONOMY OF ENGLAND. 



only in so far as it is used beyond the farm for example, 

 as food for horses employed in other ways. 



Everything consumed on the farm itself as a mean of 

 production such as the food of working animals, and 

 even of animals generally, litter, manure, seed all ought 

 to figure in the means of production, and not as products. 

 That only is really a product which may be sold or given 

 in wages. In this respect English statistics are much 

 better compiled than ours ; * for, economical notions being 

 more diffused in England than with us, they keep distinct 

 what ought to be kept separate, and the real products 

 the exportable commodities are reckoned apart from the 

 means of production. It behoves us more especially to 

 do the same, since, the means of production being a larger 

 item with our neighbours than with us, the comparison 

 would act still more disadvantageously for us were we 

 to include these in the estimate. 



This first difficulty being removed, we encounter others. 

 French proprietors complain of errors and omissions in the 

 official statistics ; these imperfections no doubt exist, but 

 they are not of such great importance as is believed. I 

 have already pointed them out, and attempted to rectify 

 them. They are not the most serious difficulty ; it is 

 the difference of prices which is the real stumbling-block. 

 Nothing is more variable than prices, whether from year 

 to year on the same spot, or in different districts of the 

 same territory : much more is this the case when the 

 question involves the placing in juxtaposition countries 

 so dissimilar. In France, anomalies are numerous ; 

 country prices are not those of the general market ; Pro- 

 vence prices are not those of Normandy ; the prices of 

 1850 are not those of 1847. It is precisely the same on 



* That is, facts, so far as known, are better weighed and applied; but, as before 

 observed, we have n<J official agricultural statistics. T. 



