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APPENDIX.

IN 1846 there appeared an elaborate treatise,* by two authors, MM. Mounier and Rubichon, the latter of whom was by his own statement a public functionary for ten years preceding the French Revolution, and both appear to take their ideas of a wholesome state of society from the institutions and practices of the middle ages. In this book it is maintained, that while French writers and administrators are in a conspiracy to represent their country as making rapid strides in prosperity, the progress of the morcellement is in fact reducing it to beggary. An imposing array of official details, adduced in apparent support of this assertion, gave a degree of weight to it which it could not claim from any correctness of information or capacity of judgment shown by its authors. Their work was cried up as a book of authority by the Quarterly Review,† in an article which excited some notice by proclaiming, on the evidence produced by these writers, that "in a few years the Code Napoleon will be employed in dividing fractions of square inches of land, and deciding by logarithms infinitesimal inheritances." As such representations, ought not to be without a permanent answer, I think it worth while to subjoin the substance of three articles in the Morning Chronicle, containing as complete a refutation of these writers and of their reviewer, partly from their own materials, as appears to be either merited or required.

* De l'Agriculture en France, d'après les Documents officiels. Par M. L. Mounier, avec des Remarques par M. Rubichon. Paris, 1846.

† For December, 1846.

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Substance (with omissions and corrections) of three articles in the Morning Chronicle of 11th, 13th, and 16th January, 1847, in reply to MM. Mounier and Rubichon and to the Quarterly Review, on the Subdivision of Landed Property in France.

I.

THE reviewer makes an extraordinary slip at the threshold of his subject, in estimating the extent to which the morcellement has actually proceeded. He finds it stated, that among nearly five millions and a half of landed proprietors, there are 2,600,000, the revenue of whose land, as rated to the land-tax, does not exceed forty shillings, which sum, he very candidly says, should rather be sixty, as the rated value is very much lower than the real value. On this he exclaims, "There already exist in France millions of examples that a proprietaire may be poorer than a peasant. . . . 2,600,000 families, comprising 13,000,000 persons, of each of which families the rated income does not exceed forty shillings, but say sixty shillings sterling, for the maintenance of five persons -and these are proprietors! The poorest day laborer would earn four times as much." He seems actually to suppose that these small proprietors, like great landlords, live only upon the rent of their land, forgetting that they have its whole produce. He might have known from the very documents he has quoted, and might have guessed if he had not known, that the forty shillings at which the land is rated in the collector's books are not the gross produce of the little estate, but its net produce, the surplus beyond the expenses of cultivation; which expenses include the subsistence of the cultivators, together with interest on the capital. The reviewer himself shows that the rated revenue of all the landed property of France is about 4 per cent. of its rated value, and does not therefore much exceed a reasonable rent. A writer who can mistake this for the whole income of a peasant cultivating his own land, gives the measure of his competency for the subject, and of the degree of attention he has paid to it.

We will now attempt to discover, from the reviewer's data and those of his authors, what may really be the condition of these 2,600,000 proprietors. As the French government estimates the land-tax at one tenth of the revenue of the land, families rated at £2 (or 50 francs) pay, it is to be presumed, five francs. The average of the contribution foncière for all France is 23 francs per hectare, and in the southern half of the kingdom, which is the most divided, two francs. A hectare being about 24 English acres, this gives from five to between six and seven acres as the portion of land which falls to the lot of each of the reviewer's forty-shilling or sixty shilling freeholders. But, it may be said, this is not the average, but the maximum of their possessions. We will therefore take another estimate, grounded on official documents, from the reviewer's authorities, MM. Mounier and Rubichon. "It is hardly credible," they say, "that there are in France more than four millions of proprietors so poor, that they pay no more than 5f. 95c." (say 6f.) "to the contribution foncière." In this case the 5f. 95c. are certainly the average. Six francs of land-tax corresponds to six acres per family on the average of all France, and to seven and a half on that of the southern division, which contains the greatest proportion of small proprietors. A still more favorable result is given by the calculations of M. Lullin de Chateauvieux, a much better authority than these authors, who estimates the average holdings of the 3,900,000 poorest proprietors at eight acres and a half. Now, take any one of these computations in a fertile country like France, suppose as bad an agriculture as exists anywhere in Western Europe, and then judge whether a single family, industrious and economical as the French of the poorer classes are, and enjoy. ing the entire produce of from five to eight and a half acres, subject to a payment of only ten pence an acre to the government, can be otherwise than in a very desirable condition? We do not forget that the land is sometimes mortgaged for part of the purchase money, and the reviewer makes a great cry about the tremendous incumbrances by which the land of France is weighed down; not amounting, however, on his own showing, to forty per cent. on the rental, which we should think is as favorable a return as could be made by any landed aristocracy in Europe. The interest on the mortgages of all France is estimated at twenty-four millions sterling

for one hundred and fourteen millions of acres-less than five shillings per acre. The owner of from five to eight acres could afford to pay double this amount, and be very well off.

We are aware that this is an average, and that four millions of properties averaging, according to M. de Chateauvieux, eight acres and a half, imply a great number of proprietors who have less. But there must be a proportional (though not an equal) number who have more; and it must not be supposed that this statement includes the large properties, one of which would be enough to keep up the average against a hundred extremely small ones. No properties are included which pay so much as twenty francs landtax, corresponding on the average of France to twenty acres-on that of the south to twenty-five. When it is considered that of the whole soil of France, much less than half is in the hands of peasant proprietors, and that this half is not more subdivided than we now see, it will probably be thought that hitherto at least the mischiefs of subdivision have not reached a very formidable height.

But it is not what France now is, so much as what she is becoming, that is the material point. Is the morcellement increasing, or likely to increase? The apologists of the French system have never denied that the land in many parts of France is too minutely divided. What they deny is, that it is a growing evil. They assert that the subdivision has reached its height, and that the reunions, by purchase, marriage, and inheritance, now balance the subdivisions. How stands the fact in this respect? Are the small properties tending to become still smaller, or not? The reader will be surprised when he finds that, with all their straining, M. Rubichon and his reviewer have failed of proving that the morcelle ment, in this sense of the term, is making any progress at all.

The reviewer has a curious theory on the subject. He thinks that" on the calculated average of three children to each inheritance," the piece of land now held by one proprietor must necessa rily be divided among three in the next generation, and among nine in that which follows. Under what system of landed property could a population increase at this rate, and not be reduced to starvation? But is it a fact that population is anywhere trebled in the space of a generation? We have here blunder within blunder of a very complicated description. In the first place, he should not

have said three children to one inheritance, but to two inheritances; for as the French law in questions of property observes that impartial justice between the two sexes in which other laws are so often deficient, the mother's patrimony is on an average equal to that of the father. In the next place, could not the reviewer have taken the trouble to ascertain at what rate the French population is actually increasing? If he had, he would have found that in the 27 years from 1815 to 1842, it only increased 18 per cent., and during that period with progressively increasing slowness, namely -in the first eleven years 9 per cent., in the next nine years less than 6 per cent., and in the seven years from 1835 to 1842, 3th per cent. only.* This retardation we must take the liberty of attributing mainly to the prudence and forethought generated in the poorest class by this very subdivision of property.

Instead, therefore, of trebling in a generation, the population increases in that period about 20 per cent. ;† and if the growth of towns, and of employments not agricultural, in the same space time, is sufficient to absorb this increase, there needs not be, and will not be, even if the law does its worst, any increase of subdivision. Now, the towns of France have increased, and are increasing, at a rate far exceeding the general increase of the population. We read only the other day in the Siecle, as the result of the census just concluded, that Paris, which in 1832 had only 930,000 inhabitants, has now more than 1,350,000, an increase of nearly fifty per cent. in fourteen years. There is every reason then to infer, from these general data, that the morcellement is making no progress. What facts have M. Rubichon and the Quarterly reviewer to oppose to these? One fact; which at first sight appears a very strong one. Between 1826 and 1835, the number of properties

These facts are taken from M. Passy. In page 343 of the present work, from a more complete comparison, which includes the results of the last census, the increase of population has been shown to be even slower than is here represented.

+ Even this is a considerable over-statement. The census of 1806 showed a population of 29,107,425. In 1846, according to the census of that year, it had only increased to 35,409,486, being an increase of little more than 21 per cent. in forty years. The longest term ever assigned to a generation is thirty years.

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