350 KURAL ECONOMY OF ENGLAND. 



possessed more capital than his neighbour, no one had a 

 preference in this competition. Every father of a family 

 desired to become a tenant or locator upon a few patches 

 of land, which he might work with the assistance of his 

 family. Thus the cottier system, as it is called, grew up 

 a system not bad in itself, unless carried to extreme ; for, 

 besides that it admits of dispensing with capital, when 

 that is not forthcoming, by substituting labour in its 

 stead, it has this advantage, that it does away with the 

 paid servant that is to say, that class of men who live 

 entirely upon the demand for labour, and are subjected 

 to its vicissitudes. In 1847, Ireland, strictly speaking, 

 contained very few persons receiving wages ; those who 

 would otherwise have been day-labourers were small 

 farmers. But there must be a limit to everything, and 

 the division of allotments came to an end, owing to the 

 increasing number of competitors. The small tenants had 

 commenced by taking farms upon which a family could 

 barely exist after paying their rent. These farms then 

 underwent a first division, then a second and a third, 

 until at last it came to those 600,000 rentings below 

 fifteen acres that is to say, to a point where the culti- 

 vator could obtain only just sufficient to keep him in life, 

 where the least failure of the crop began by render- 

 ing payment of rent impossible, and ended in being a 

 sentence of death for the tenant himself. 



Owing to the superior quality of the soil and abun- 

 dance of hands, the gross produce, although equal to 

 only half of the English, was still pretty considerable, 

 and, reduced to French value, might be estimated at 

 800,000,000 francs, or 100 francs per hectare, (=32s. 

 per acre), as in France, divided as follows : 



