Rural Economy of France since 1789. 
525 
sfali', ill ;i maiinor approximating to that system of leasinj? con- 
sideiablc tracts, wliich Las exercised so important an influence on 
Enf^lish agriculture. 
M. de Lavergne is not disposed to consider an extreme division 
of landed property as an obstacle to agricultural progress, and we 
shall presently examine the arguments by which he attempts to 
establish his opinion ; but he justly describes the nefarious effects 
which resulted from a large quantity of land being suddenly 
thrown into the market. 
In the first place, its value was depreciated to a ruinous 
extent ; next, the estates being subdivided were brought within 
the reach of small capitalists, who were tempted to embark 
nearly all their property in the purchase, leaving little or nothing 
to meet the expenses of cultivation. They generally gained 
little by exchanging their position as tenants for that of pro- 
prietors, for such a policy is calculated rather to divert capital 
into other channels than to increase the means applicable to the 
culture of the soil, and its adoption has prt)duced the natural con- 
secjuences. A wealthy tenant farmer is scarcely to be found in 
France; but poor landed j)roprietors exist in thousands. The 
bane of French agriculture is that morbid ambition of the 
peasantry to possess land : this is the true cause of their poverty, 
and consequently of their imperviousness to the influence of agri- 
cultural progress. The savings of a life passed in sordid fru- 
gality and abject privations are commonly devoted to this object: 
if these do not suffice, to eke out the purchase-money, a loan is 
procured at the rate of 5 per cent., although the investment will not 
make more than 2^, or at the utmost 3 per cent. These results 
may be in the main traced back to that wholesale act of confisca- 
tion to which we have referred. M. de Lavergne demonstrates 
very forcibly that it was principally middle-size estates that were 
increased by the ])urchasc of the so-called national property, and 
that the number of small estates has not so rapidly increased since 
the Revolution as some people have imagined. In 1789 Arthur 
Young calculated that the number of small estates comprised full 
one-third of the kingdom ; and Necker wrote at the same time, 
" there are in France an immensity of small rural estates." With 
all the subdividing tendencies of the laws of inlieritance in 
France, it is not probable that the number of these small hold- 
ings have materially increased. This, no doubt, is owing to 
two causes : one is the stationary or almost retrograde condition 
of the population, in consequence of French families now-a-days 
rarely numbering more than one or two children. W e have been 
told by a district magistrate { jage dc paix) in Normandy, that 
within his recollection the number of births had diminished by 
two-thirds in his district, and consequently the population had 
2 N 2 
