TJie Ardennes. 
25 
He further goes on to show how that province, which early 
fell to the Crown, was especially oppressed with taxes, and then, 
again, devastated by revolutionary wars ; so that, where capital 
was most indispensable and most hard to acquire, there the 
existing sources of wealth were most cruelly drained. 
In the Report given of the competition, a more peculiar in- 
terest centres in some of the farms rewarded with the gold 
medal than in the large and spirited enterprise of the successful 
candidate, INI. Gerard de ^lelcy, whose management turns on a 
beet-distillery, as a basis for the production of roots, stock, 
manure, and corn on moderately good land, such as might be 
met with elsewhere. 
A farm of 1000 acres, of which 770 acres are arable, on which 
2400/. has within the last ten or twelve years been judiciously 
expended on improvements — where the rotation is, corn, 360 
acres; rape-seed and roots, 180 acres; lucerne, saintfoin, and 
clover, 180 acres ; beans, 25 acres ; fallow, 25 acres ; where the 
inventory taken in 1860 exceeds that of 1849 by 4400/. — must 
ever command attention, and its well-kept accounts must ad- 
vance the science of Rural Economy. From these we gather 
that " the erection of the beet-root distillery (on Champon's 
principle) cost 604/. ; that, with working expense of 13r/. per 
day, the juice extracted from 5 tons 16 cwts. of beet (about 
2100 gallons) is distilled ; that the spirit produced amounts to 
from to 5|- per cent., or, in other words, that on the average 
2 cwts. of beet produce 11^ gallons of pure alcohol (alcool 
ahsolu). 
When we see what a mighty agent the introduction of beet as 
an industrial crop has proved for the regeneration of agriculture 
generally in the North of France, we may see reason to note and 
ponder such statistics in our minds, even if at present we cannot 
advantageously turn them to practical account. 
But, as I have said, the distinctive interest here centres, 
not in the Winner, but in the Field, who all ran in nearly the 
same colours. They are proprietors of rather small farms, who, 
AS a last resource, when their tenants were quite farmed out, 
took possession of the waste, and by energy rather than by 
capital put a new face upon it. These farms had many features 
in common, for it is well said in the Report, " the lineaments 
■of wretchedness are uniform," and many pictures of their former 
condition still exist around. A hungry soil, saturated with wet 
or harried and drowned by waters bursting down at random from 
the upper grounds till they subsided into pestilential pools ; a 
subsoil of sticky yellow clay, mixed with stones that the farmer 
dare not bring to the surface ; " roads — such roads !" — miserable 
liovels for buildings ; fields abandoned in despair to scrub, furze, 
