rate of annual increase of the populations of various countries, that of France, from 1817 to 1827, is stated at 63 per cent, that of England during a similar decennial period being 1 annually, and that of the United States nearly 3. According to the official returns as analyzed by M. Legoyt,* the increase of the population, which from 1801 to 1806 was at the rate of 1.28 per cent annually, averaged only 047 per cent from 1806 to 1831; from 1831 to 1836 it averaged 0.60 per cent; from 1836 to 1841, 041 per cent, and from 1841 to 1846, 0·68 per Jonnès, he adds, is not entitled to implicit confidence. The following table given by M. Quetelet (On Man and the Development of his Faculties, vol. i. ch. 7), also on the authority of Rau, contains additional matter, and differs in some items from the preceding, probably from the author's having taken, in those cases, an average of different years: Ireland. cent. At the census of 1851 the rate of annual increase shown was only 108 per cent in the five years, or 0.21 annually; and at the census of 1856 only 071 per cent in five years, or 0.14 annually; so, that, in the words of M. de Lavergne, "population has almost ceased to increase in France " Even this slow increase is wholly the effect of a diminution of deaths; the number of births not increasing at all, while the proportion of the births to the population is constantly diminishing.§ This slow growth of the numbers of the people, while ceding year 1846, is summed up in the following table: 1.14 2.40 Denmark 1.65 1.33 1.08 0.94 A very carefully prepared statement, by M. Legoyt, in the Journal des Economistes for May 1847, which brings up the results for France to the census of the pre *Journal des Economistes for March and May 1847. †M. Legoyt is of opinion that the population was understated in 1841, and the increase between that time and 1846 consequently overstated, and that the real increase during the whole period was something intermediate between the last two averages, or not much more than one in two hundred. Journal des Economistes for February 1847. In the Journal for January 1865, M. Legoyt gives some of the numbers slightly altered, and, I presume, corrected. The series of percentages is 1.28, 0.31, 0·69, 060, 0·41, 0·68, 0.22, and 0.20. The last census, that of 1861, shows a slight reaction, the percentage, independently of the newly acquired departments, being 0:32. The following are the numbers given by M. Legoyt: From 1824 to 1823 annual number of births 981,914, being 1 in 32:30 of the population. In the last two years the births, according to M. Legoyt, were swelled by the effects of a considerable immigration. "This diminution of births," he observes, "while there is a constant, though not a rapid increase both of population and of marriages, can only be attributed to the progress of prudence and forethought in families. It was a foreseen consequence of our civil and social institutions, which, producing a daily increasing subdivision of fortunes, capital increases much more rapidly, has caused a noticeable improvement in the condition of the labouring class. The circumstances of that portion of the class who are landed proprietors are not easily ascertained with precision, being of course extremely variable: but the mere labourers, who derived no direct benefit from the changes in landed property which took place at the Revolution, have unquestionably much improved in condition since that period. Dr. Rau testifies both landed and moveable, call forth in our people the instincts of conservation and of comfort.' In four departments, among which are two of the most thriving in Nor. mandy, the deaths even then exceeded the births. The census of 1856 exhibits the remarkable fact of a positive diminution in the population of 54 out of the 86 departments. A significant comment on the pauper-warren theory. See M. de Lavergne's analysis of the returns. *"The classes of our population which have only wages, and are therefore the most exposed to indigence, are now (1846) much better provided with the necessaries of food, lodging, and clothing, than they were at the beginning of the century. This may be proved by the testimony of all persons who can remember the earlier of the two periods compared. Were there any doubts on the subject, they might easily be dissipated by consulting old cultivators and workmen, as I have myself done in various localities, without meeting with a single contrary testimony; we may also appeal to the facts collected by an accurate observer, M. Villermé, in his Picture of the Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, book ii. ch. 1." (Researches on the Causes of Indigence, by A. Clément, pp. 84-5.) The same writer speaks (p. 118) of the considerable rise which has taken place since 1789 in the wages of agricultural day-labourers;" and adds the following evidence of a higher standard of habitual requirements, even in that portion of the town population, the state of which is usually represented as most deplorable. "In the last fifteen or twenty years a considerable change has taken place in the habits of the operatives in our manufacturing towns: they now expend much more than formerly on clothing and ornament.... Certain classes of workpeople, such as the canuts of Lyons," (according to all representations, like their counterpart, our handloom weavers, the very worst paid class of artizans,) "no longer show themselves, as they did formerly, covered with filthy rags." (Page 164.) The preceding statements were given in former editions of this work, being the best to which I had at the time access; but evidence, both of a more recent, and of a more minute and precise character, will now be to a similar fact in the case of another country in which the subdivision of the land is probably excessive, the Palatinate.* I am not aware of a single authentic instance which supports the assertion that rapid multiptication is promoted by peasant properties. Instances may undoubtedly be cited of its not being prevented by them, and one of the principal of these is Belgium; the prospects of which, in respect to population, are at present a matter of con found in the important work of M. Léonee de Lavergne, Rural Economy of France since 1789. According to that painstaking, wellinformed, and most impartial enquirer, the average daily wages of a French labourer have risen, since the commencement of the Revolution, in the ratio of 19 to 30, while, owing to the more constant employment, the total earnings have increased in a still greater ratio, not short of double. The following are the statements of M. de Lavergne (2nd ed. p. 57): "Arthur Young estimates at 19 sous [9d.] the average of a day's wages, which must now be about 1 franc 50 centimes [18. 3d.], and this increase only represents a part of the improvement. Though the rural popu lation has remained about the same in numbers, the addition made to the population since 1789 having centred in the towns, the number of actual working days has increased, first because, the duration of life having augmented, the number of able-bodied men is greater, and next, because labour is better organized, partly through the suppression of several festival-holidays, partly by the mere effect of a more active demand. When we take into account the increased number of his working days, the annual receipts of the rural workman must have doubled. This augmentation of wages answers to at least an equal augmentation of comforts, since the prices of the chief necessaries of life have changed but little, and those of manufactured, for example of woven, articles, have materially diminished. The lodging of the labourers has also improved, if not in all, at least in most of our provinces." M. de Lavergne's estimate of the average amount of a day's wages is grounded on a careful comparison, in this and all other economical points of view, of all the different provinces of France. * In his little book on the Agriculture of the Palatinate, already cited. He says that the daily wages of labour, which during the last years of the war were unusually high, and so continued until 1817, afterwards sank to a lower money-rate, but that the prices of many commodities having fallen in a still greater proportion, the condition of the peo ple was unequivocally improved. The food given to farm labourers by their employers has also greatly improved in quantity and siderable uncertainty. Belgium has the most rapidly increasing population on the Continent; and when the circumstances of the country require, as they must soon do, that this rapidity should be checked, there will be a considerable strength of existing habit to be broken through. One of the unfavourable circumstances is the great power possessed over the minds of the people by the Catholic priesthood, whose influence is everywhere strongly exerted against restraining population. As yet, however, it must be remembered that the indefatigable industry and great agricultural skill of the people have rendered the existing rapidity of increase practically innocuous; the great number of large estates still undivided affording by their gradual dismemberment, a resource for the necessary augmentation of the gross produce; and there are, besides, many large manufacturing towns, and mining and coal districts, which attract and employ a considerable portion of the annual increase of population. § 5. But even where peasant properties are accompanied by an excess of numbers, this evil is not necessarily attended with the additional economical disadvantage of too great a subdivision of the land. It does not follow because landed property is minutely divided, that farms will be so. As large properties are perfectly compatible with small farms, so are small properties with farms of an adequate size; and a subdivision of occupancy is not an inevitable consequence of even undue multiplication among peasant quality. "It is now considerably better than about forty years ago, when the poorer class obtained less flesh-meat and puddings, and no cheese, butter, and the like." (p. 20.) "Such an increase of wages" (adds the Professor) "which must be estimated not in money, but in the quantity of necessaries and conveniences which the labourer is enabled to procure, is, by universal admission, a proof that the mass of capital must have increased." It proves not only this, but also that the labouring population has not increased in an equal degree; and that, in this instance as well as in France, the division of the land, even when excessive, has been compatible with a strengthening of the prudential checks to population, proprietors. As might be expected from their admirable intelligence in things relating to their occupation, the Flemish peasantry have long learnt this lesson. "The habit of not divid ing properties," says Dr. Rau,* “and the opinion that this is advantageous, have been so completely preserved in Flanders, that even now, when a peasant dies leaving several children, they do not think of dividing his patrimony, though it be neither entailed nor settled in trust; they prefer selling it entire, and sharing the proceeds, considering it as a jewel which loses its value when it is divided." That the same feeling must prevail widely even in France, is shown by the great frequency of sales of land, amounting in ten years to a fourth port of the whole soil of the country; and M. Passy, in his tract "On the Changes in the Agricultural Condition of the Department of the Eure since the year 1800,"t states other facts tending to the same conclusion. “The example," says he, " of this department attests that there does not exist, as some writers have imagined, between the distribution of property and that of cultivation, a connexion which tends invincibly to assimilate them. In no portion of it have changes of ownership had a perceptible influence on the size of holdings. While, in districts of small farming, lands belonging to the same owner are ordinarily distributed among many tenants, so neither is it uncommon, in places where the grande culture prevails, for the same farmer to rent the lands of several proprietors. In the plains of Vexin, cultivators do not content themselves in particular, many active and rich with a single farm; others add to the lands of their principal holding, all those in the neighbourhood which Page 334 of the Brussels translation. He cites as an authority, Schwerz, Papers on Agriculture, i. 185. † One of the many important papers which have appeared in the Journal des Economistes, the organ of the principal political economists of Frances, and doing great and increasing honour to their knowledge and ability. M. Passy's essay has been reprinted separately as a pamphlet. they are able to hire, and in this on the contrary, wherever the small properties are divided among too many proprietors, I believe it to be true that the large properties also are par celled out among too many farmers, and that the cause is the same in both cases, a backward state of capital, skill, and agricultural enterprise. There is reason to believe that the subdivi sion in France is not more excessive than is accounted for by this cause; that it is diminishing, not increasing; and that the terror expressed in some quarters at the progress of the mor If peasant properties have any effect in promoting subdivision beyond the degree which corresponds to the agri "In some places," says M. de Lavergne,* "in the neighbourhood of Paris, for example, where the advantages of the grande culture become evident, the size of farms tends to in-cellement, is one of the most groundcrease, several farms are thrown to- less of real or pretended panics.* gether into one, and farmers enlarge their holdings by renting parcelles from a number of different proprietors. | Elsewhere farms as well as properties of too great extent, tend to division. Cultivation spontaneously finds out the organization which suits it best." It is a striking fact, stated by the same eminent writer,† that the departments which have the greatest number of small separate accounts with the taxcollector, are the Nord, the Somme, the Pas de Calais, the Seine Inferieure, the Aisne, and the Oise; all of them among the richest and best cultivated, and the first-mentioned of them the very richest and best cultivated, in France. * Mr. Laing, in his latest publication, "Observations on the Social and Political State of the European People in 1848 and 1849," a book devoted to the glorification of England, and the disparagement of everything elsewhere which others, or even he himself in former works, had thought worthy of praise, argues that "although the land itself is not divided and subdivided" on the death of the proprietor, "the value of the land is, and with effects almost as prejudicial to social progress. The value of each share becomes a debt or burden upon the land." tural population is retrograde; " each geneConsequently the condition of the agriculration is worse off than the preceding one, although the land is neither less nor more divided, nor worse cultivated." And this he gives as the explanation of the great indebtedUndue subdivision, and excessiveness of the small landed proprietors in smallness of holdings, are undoubtedly a prevalent evil in some countries of peasant proprietors, and particularly in parts of Germany and France. The governments of Bavaria and Nassau have thought it necessary to impose a legal limit to subdivision, and the Prussian Government unsuccessfully proposed the same measure to the Estates of its Rhenish Provinces. But I do not think it will anywhere be found that the petite culture is the system of the peasants, and the grande culture that of the great landlords: *Rural Economy of France, p. 455. P. 117. See, for facts of a similar tendency, pp. 141, 250, and other passages of the same important treatise; which, on the other hand, equally abounds with evidence of the mischievous effect of subdivision when too minute, or when the nature of the soil and of its products is not suitable to it. France (pp. 97-9). If these statements were correct, they would invalidate all which Mr. Laing affirmed so positively in other writings, and repeats in this, respecting the peculiar efficacy of the possession of land in preventing over-population. But he is entirely only country of which he speaks from actual residence, Norway, he does not pretend that the condition of the peasant proprietors is deteriorating. The facts already cited prove that in respect to Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland, the assertion is equally wide of the mark; and what has been shown respecting the slow increase of population in France, demonstrates that if the condition of the French peasantry was deteriorating, it could not be from the cause supposed by Mr. Laing. The truth I believe to be that in every country without exception, in which peasant properties prevail, the condition of the people is improving, the produce of the land and even its fertility increasing, and from the larger surplus which remains after feeding the agricultural classes, the towns are augmenting both in population and in the well-being of their inhabitants. mistaken as to the matter of fact. In the moral and their physical welfare. Compared with the English system of cultivation by hired labour, it must be regarded as eminently beneficial to the labouring class. We are not on the present occasion called upon to compare it with the joint ownership of the land by associations of labourers. * French history strikingly confirms these conclusions. Three times during the course of land; and these times immediately preof ages the peasantry have been purchasers ceded the three principal eras of French agricultural prosperity. cultural practices of the country, and which is customary on its large estates, the cause must lie in one of the salutary influences of the system; the eminent degree in which it promotes providence on the part of those who, not being yet peasant proprietors, hope to become so. In England, where the agricultural labourer has no investment for his savings but the savings bank, and no position to which he can rise by any exercise of economy, except perhaps that of a petty shopkeeper, with its chances of bankruptcy, there is nothing at all resembling the intense spirit of "In the worst times," says the historian thrift which takes possession of one Michelet (The People, Part i. ch. 1), “the times of universal poverty, when even the who, from being a day labourer, can rich are poor and obliged to sell, the poor are raise himself by saving to the condi- enabled to buy: no other purchaser pretion of a landed proprietor. Accordingsenting himself, the peasant in rags arrives to almost all authorities, the real cause of the morcellement is the higher price which can be obtained for land by selling it to the peasantry, as an investment for their small accumulations, than by disposing of it entire to some rich purchaser who has no object but to live on its income without improving it. The hope of obtaining such an investment is the most powerful of inducements, to those who are without land, to practise the industry, frugality, and self-restraint, on which their success in this object of ambition is dependent. As the result of this enquiry into the direct operation and indirect influences of peasant properties, I conceive it to be established, that there is no necessary connexion between this form of landed property and an imperfect state of the arts of production; that it is favourable in quite as many respects as it is unfavourable, to the most effective use of the powers of the soil; that no other existing state of agricultural economy has so beneficial an effect on the industry, the intelligence, the frugality, and prudence of the population, nor tends on the whole so much to discourage an improvident increase of their numbers; and that no existing state, therefore, is on the whole so favourable, both to their with his piece of gold, and acquires a little bit of land. These moments of disaster in which the peasant was able to buy land at a low price, have always been followed by a sudden gush of prosperity which people could not account for. Towards 1500, for example, when France, exhausted by Louis XI., seemed to be completing its ruin in Italy, the noblesse who went to the wars were obliged suddenly began to flourish; men began to to sell: the land, passing into new hands, labour and to build. This happy moment, in the style of courtly historians, was called the good Louis XII. "Unhappily it did not last long. Scarcely had the land recovered itself when the taxcollector fell upon it; the wars of religion followed, and seemed to rase everything to the ground; with horrible miseries, dreadful famines, in which mothers devoured their children. Who would believe that the country recovered from this? Scarcely is the war ended, when from the devastated fields, and the cottages still black with the flames, comes forth the hoard of the peasant. He buys; in ten years, France wears a new face; in twenty or thirty, all possessions have doubled baptized by a royal name, is called the good Henry IV. and the great Richelieu." and trebled in value. This moment, again Of the third era it is needless again to speak; it was that of the Revolution. Whoever would study the reverse of the of small yeomen to make room for large |