Report on the Agriculture of Belgium. 
37 
To this must be added house-rent and food, which consists of 
rye (or mixture) bread, potatoes, buttermilk, green vegetables, 
and sometimes pork or bacon. We presume that the better agri- 
cultural labourers in most English counties are in at least as good 
A position as this, taking into account their ordinary wages, 
their money at harvest-time and for other piece-work, their cottage 
and garden, their potato-ground, and other privileges. We need 
not give the figures in proof of such an inference, as every 
English farmer can supply them from his own experience.* 
Summary. — Before leaving la petite culture we must point 
out one or two of its characteristic features and results. It will 
liave been already understood that one prominent feature of the 
.small farmers of Belgium is their dislike to buy anything. For 
this reason they content themselves with living on the produce 
of their farm, after selling the wheat, the butter, and the industrial 
crops ; they are therefore enabled to save money under circum- 
stances in which an English agricultural labourer would probably 
run into debt. The money that they save they hide. It is buried 
in the ground, built into the cottage, or otherwise mysteriously 
boarded. Considering the population of the small-farm districts 
of Belgium, it can be easily understood that a propensity to hoard 
bullion must in time have a sensible effect on the resources of the 
country. The Government, therefore, were some years ago under 
the necessity of issuing bank-notes as legal tender. The peasant- 
farmers, by degrees, came to understand that notes could be 
exchanged, and used as money, quite as readily as gold and 
silver, while the paper was an infinitely more convenient 
medium. Thus, by degrees, the bullion was set free, and its 
place in the hoard supplied by bank-notes. A small farmer 
knows nothing of investments, and has but one idea of the value 
of money, viz., its purchasing power of land. The consequence 
is, that in the small-farm districts land will sell at fabulous 
prices. A man has saved so many hundred or so many thousand 
i'rancs ; the money is useless to him as money ; but if he can 
exchange it for a bit of land, he can derive some good from it. 
Accordingly, land often sells at prices that would not yield more 
than one per cent, interest to the buyer ; and even in the large- 
farm districts parcels of land commonly sell at more than forty 
years' purchase. In the Pays de Waes and surrounding districts, 
where the subdivision of property has been carried to an extreme, 
±he man who has the most money generally becomes the pur- 
■at 14/. per acre; and taking into account the conditions of Belgian land-tenure, 
into which subject we shall enter at more length presently, we do not think it too 
large a sum. 
* Vide, the payments made by Mr. Torr, of Aylesby, Lincolnshire, given in 
rthe last number of this Journal (vol. v. 2nd series, p. 437). 
