Small Holdings in France. 
619 
for the last three years. His oats have yielded nearly double that 
quantity. The price of wheat averages 47s. per quarter. Oats are 
(May, 1892) all consumed on the premises. But little barley is 
grown. 
Although hardly a single cultivateur owns more than part 
of the land farmed by him, the house and buildings are al- 
most invariably his property. I question, however, whether the 
Vraignes cultivateurs are any the worse off for hiring, instead of 
owning, a considerable part of their farms. For the rent of land 
has fallen in Picardy, as well as in England, to about half what it 
brought in fifteen years ago, and the farmers get the full benefit of 
the reduction, whereas owners suffer from the depreciation of their 
capital, locked up in land. 
The term menager will probably be as new to the readers of 
this Journal as it is to me. I seize upon it with considerable 
avidity, as supplying a much-needed name for the class inter- 
mediate between farmers and labourers — a class likely enough to be 
brought into existence in England through the operation of the 
Small Holdings Act. The term menager seems to be limited to the 
former province of Picardy, where it is in almost universal use, 
implying a villager, possessing house, land, cows, sheep and pigs, 
farm buildings and hand tools, but not horses, ploughs, nor imple- 
ments requiring horse-draught. For horse labour, the menager is 
entirely dependent on the cultivateur, who in his turn is largely 
dependent on the menager for his hand-labour, especially at harvest- 
time. M. Abdias de Vismes, who is the principal cultivateur at 
Vraignes, makes it an important part of his business to supply 
horse-labour to the menager, charging 50 francs (2^.) an acre for all 
the operations connected with putting in the wheat crop, including 
carting it home at harvest. His price is 25 francs per acre for 
barley and oats. 
M. de Vismes volunteered the observation that the cxdtivateurs 
look upon the mena^ers as their equals socially, in which view 
Madame de Vismes entirely concurred. When I remarked that 
landowners and farmers in England could not see the advantage of 
labourers having more land than an allotment to cultivate, Madame 
de Vismes exclaimed, “What an idea ! I always said the English 
were egoist.” Had Madame de Vismes been at all acquainted 
with the conditions of rural life in England, she would, I am 
inclined to think, have passed a less severe judgment upon us. But, 
having passed her whole existence in Picardy, where diflusion of 
property is almost universal, it is not surprising that her economic 
views should differ widely from ours. It was remarkable, however, 
and very much to her credit, that as the wife of a considerable 
yeoman and the daughter of another, she should have looked 
favourably on the menager class. 
The village of Vraignes is about as unlike an English village as 
any two aggregations of rural dwellings could well be. The most 
striking difference is the absence of flowers and the rarityj of 
labourers’ cottages. What few of the latter exist are mostly of 
