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burthened with a numerous pauper population, through the operation of the worst regulated system of poor-law administration in Europe, except that of England before the new Poor Law.* Nor is Switzerland in some other respects a favourable example of all that peasant properties might effect. There exists a series of statistical accounts of the Swiss cantons, drawn up mostly with great care and intelligence, containing detailed information, of tolerably recent date, respecting the condition of the land and of the people. From these, the subdivision appears to be often so minute, that it can hardly be supposed not to be excessive: and the indebtedness of the proprietors in the flourishing canton of Zurich "borders," as the writer expresses it, on the incredible;" so that "only the intensest industry, frugality, temperance, and complete freedom of commerce enable them to stand their ground." Yet the general conclusion deducible from these books is that since the beginning of the century, and concurrently with the subdivision of many great estates whieh belonged to nobles or to the cantonal governments, there has been a striking and rapid improvement in almost every department of agriculture, as well as in the houses, the habits, and the food of the people. The writer of the account of Thurgau goes so far as to say, that since the There have been considerable changes in the Poor Law administration and legislation of the Canton of Berne since the sen

tence in the text was written. But I am not sufficiently acquainted with the nature

ando peration of these changes, to speak more

particularly of them here.

+ Historical, Geographical, and Statistical Picture of Switzerland. Part I. Canton of 1834, pp. 80-1. There are villages in Zurich, he adds, in which there is not a single property unmortgaged. It does not, however, follow that each individual proprietor is deeply involved because the aggregate mass

Zurich. By Gerold Meyer Von Knonau,

of incumbrances is large. In the Canton of

Schaffhausen, for instance, it is stated that the landed properties are almost all mortgaged, but rarely for more than one-half their registered value (Part XII. Canton of Schaffhausen, by Edward Im-Thurn, 1840, p. 52), and the mortgages are often for the improvement and enlargement of the estate. (Part XVII. Canton of Thurgau, by J. A. Pupikofer, 1837, p. 209.)

subdivision of the feudal estates into peasant properties, it is not uncommon for a third or a fourth part of an estate to produce as much grain, and support as many head of cattle, as the whole estate did before.*

§ 3. One of the countries in which peasant proprietors are of oldest date, and most numerous in proportion to the population, is Norway. Of the social and economical condition of that country an interesting account has been given by Mr. Laing. His testimony in favour of small landed properties both there and elsewhere, is given with great decision. I shall quote a few passages.

"If small proprietors are not good farmers, it is not from the same cause here which we are told makes them so in Scotland-indolence and want of exertion. The extent to which irrigation is carried on in these glens and valleys shows a spirit of exertion and cooperation" (I request particular attention to this point), "to which the latter can show nothing similar. Hay being the principal winter support of live stock, and both it and corn, as well as potatoes, liable, from the shallow soil and powerful reflection of sunshine from the rocks, to be burnt and withered up, the greatest exertions are made to bring water from the head of each glen, along such a level as will give the command of it to each farmer at the head of his fields. This is done by leading it in wooden troughs (the half of a tree roughly scooped) from the highest perennial stream among the hills, through woods, across ravines, along the rocky, often perpendicular, sides of the glens, and from this main trough giving a lateral one to each farmer in passing the head of his farm. He distributes this supply by moveable troughs among his fields; and at this season waters each rig successively with scoops like those used by bleachers in watering cloth, laying his trough between every two rigs. One would not believe, without seeing it, how very large an extent of land is traversed expeditiously by these artificial * Thürgau, p. 72.

showers. The extent of the main troughs is very great. In one glen I walked ten miles, and found it troughed on both sides: on one, the chain is continued down the main valley for forty miles.* Those may be bad farmers who do such things; but they are not indolent, nor ignorant of the principle of working in concert, and keeping up establishments for common benefit. They are undoubtedly, in these respects, far in advance of any community of cottars in our Highland glens. They feel as proprietors, who receive the advantage of their own exertions. The excellent state of the roads and bridges is another proof that the country is inhabited by people who have a common interest to keep them under repair. There are no tolls."+

On the effects of peasant proprietorship on the Continent generally, the same writer expresses himself as follows.‡

"If we listen to the large farmer, the scientific agriculturist, the " [English] "political economist, good farming must perish with large farms; the very idea that good farming can exist, unless on large farms cultivated with great capital, they hold to be absurd. Draining, manuring, economical arrangement, cleaning the land, regular

*Reichensperger (The Land Question) quoted by Mr. Kay (Social Condition and Education of the People in England and Europe,) observes, "that the parts of Europe where the most extensive and costly plans for watering the meadows and lands have been carried out in the greatest perfection, are those where the lands are very much subdivided, and are in the hands of small

proprietors. He instances the plain round Valencia, several of the southern depart ments of France, particularly those of Vau

cluse and Bouches du Rhone, Lombardy

Tuscany, the districts of Sienna, Lucca, and Bergamo, Piedmont, many parts of Germany, &c., in all which parts of Europe the land is very much subdivided among small proprietors. In all these parts great and expensive systems and plans of general irrigation have been carried out,and are now being supported, by the small proprietors themselves; thus showing how they are able to accomplish, by means of combination, work requiring the expenditure of great quantities of capital." Kay, i. 126.

Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway,

op. 36, 37.

Notes of a Traveller, pp. 299 et seqq.

rotations, valuable stock and imple. ments, all belong exclusively to large farms, worked by large capital, and by This reads very well; hired labour. but if we raise our eyes from their books to their fields, and coolly compare see in the best districts what we farmed in large farms, with what we see in the best districts farmed in small farms, we see, and there is no blinking the fact, better crops on the ground in Flanders, East Friesland, Holstein, in short, on the whole line of the arable land of equal quality on the Continent, from the Sound to Calais, than we see on the line of British coast opposite to this line, and in the same latitudes, from the Frith of Forth all Minute labour on round to Dover. small portions of arable ground gives evidently, in equal soils and climate, a superior productiveness, where these small portions belong in property, as in Flanders, Holland, Friesland, and Ditmarsch in Holstein, to the farmer. It is not pretended by our agricultural writers, that our large farmers, even in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, or the Lothians, approach to the garden-like cultivation, attention to manures, drainage, and clean state of the land, or in productiveness from a small space of soil not originally rich, which distinguish the small farmers of Flanders, or their system. In the best farmed parish in Scotland or England, more land is wasted in the corners and borders of the fields of large farms, in the roads through them, unnecessarily wide because they are bad, and bad because they are wide, in neglected commons, waste spots, useless belts and clumps of sorry trees, and such unproductive of the parish, if they were all laid toareas, than would maintain the poor gether and cultivated. But large capital applied to farming is of course only applied to the very best of the soils of a country. It cannot touch the small unproductive spots which require more time and labour to fertilize them than is consistent with a quick return of capital. But although hired time and labour cannot be applied beneficially to such cultivation, the owner's own time and labour may. He is working for

no higher terms at first from his land than a bare living. But in the course of generations fertility and value are produced; a better living, and even very improved processes of husbandry, are attained. Furrow draining, stall feeding all summer, liquid manures, are universal in the husbandry of the small farms of Flanders, Lombardy, Switzerland. Our most improving districts under large farms are but beginning to adopt them. Dairy husbandry even, and the manufacture of the largest cheeses by the co-operation of many small farmers, the mutual assurance of property against fire and hail-storms, by the co-operation of small farmers the most scientific and expensive of all agricultural operations in modern times, the manufacture of beet-root sugar-the supply of the European markets with flax and hemp, by the husbandry of small farmers-the abundance of legumes, fruits, poultry, in the usual diet even of the lowest classes abroad, and the total want of such variety at the tables even of our middle classes, and this variety and abundance *The manner in which the Swiss peasants combine to carry on cheesemaking by their united capital deserves to be noted. "Each parish in Switzerland hires a man, generally from the district of Gruyère in the canton of Freyburg, to take care of the herd, and make

the cheese. One cheeseman, one pressman or assistant, and one cowherd, are considered necessary for every forty cows. The owners of the cows get credit each of them, in a book daily, for the quantity of milk given by each cow. The cheeseman and his assistants milk the cows, put the milk all together, and make cheese of it, and at the end of the season each owner receives the weight of cheese proportionable to the quantity of milk his cows have delivered. By this co-operative plan, instead of the small-sized unmarketable cheeses only,

which each could produce out of his three or four cows' milk, he has the same weight in large marketable cheese superior in quality, because made by people who attend to no sistants are paid so much per head of the cows, in money or in cheese, or sometimes they hire the cows, and pay the owners in money or cheese."-Notes of a Traveller, p.

other business. The cheeseman and his as

351. A similar system exists in the French Jura. See, for full details, Lavergne, Rural Economy of France, 2nd ed., pp. 139 et seqq. One of the most remarkable points in this

interesting case of combination of labour, is the confidence which it supposes, and which experience must justify in the integrity of the persons employed.

P.E.

essentially connected with the husbandry of small farmers-all these are features in the occupation of a country by small proprietor-farmers, which must make the inquirer pause before he admits the dogma of our land doctors at home, that large farms worked by hired labour and great capital can alone bring out the greatest productiveness of the soil and furnish the greatest supply of the necessaries and conveniences of life to the inhabitants of a country."

§ 4. Among the many flourishing regions of Germany in which peasant properties prevail, I select the Palatinate, for the advantage of quoting, from an English source, the results of recent personal observation of its agriculture and its people. Mr. Howitt, a writer whose habit it is to see all English objects and English socialities on their brightest side, and who, in treating of the Rhenish peasantry, certainly does not underrate the rudeness of their implements, and the inferiority of their ploughing, nevertheless shows that under the invigorating influence of the feelings of proprietorship, they make up for the imperfections of their apparatus by the inten sity of their application. "The peasant harrows and clears his land till it is in the nicest order, and it is admirable to see the crops which he obtains."* "The peasants are the great and ever-present objects of country life. They are the great population of the country, because they themselves are the possessors. This country is, in fact, for the most part, in the hands of the people. It is parcelled out among the multitude. The peasants are not, as with us, for the most part, totally cut off from property in the soil they cultivate, totally dependent on the labour afforded by others- they are themselves the proprietors. It is, perhaps, from this cause that they are probably the most industrious peasantry in the world. They labour busily, early and late, because they *Rural and Domestic Life of Germany,

p. 27.

† Ibid. p. 40.

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feel that they are labouring for them- | lay in a sufficient stock of wood, find selves. The German peasants plenty of work in ascending into the work hard, but they have no actual mountainous woods, and bringing want. Every man has his house, his thence fuel. It would astonish the orchard, his roadside trees, commonly English common people to see the inso heavy with fruit, that he is obliged tense labour with which the Germans to prop and secure them all ways, or earn their firewood. In the depth of they would be torn to pieces. He has frost and snow, go into any of their his corn-plot, his plot for mangel- hills and woods, and there you find wurzel, for hemp, and so on. He is them hacking up stumps, cutting off his own master; and he, and every branches, and gathering, by all means member of his family, have the strongest which the official wood-police will motives to labour. You see the effect allow, boughs, stakes, and pieces of of this in that unremitting diligence wood, which they convey home with which is beyond that of the whole the most incredible toil and patience."* world besides, and his economy, which After a description of their careful and is still greater. The Germans, indeed, laborious vineyard culture, he conare not so active and lively as the tinues,+ "In England, with its great English. You never see them in a quantity of grass lands, and its large bustle, or as though they meant to farms, so soon as the grain is in, and knock off a vast deal in a little time. the fields are shut up for hay grass, the They are, on the contrary, slow, country seems in a comparative state but for ever doing. They plod on from of rest and quiet. But here they are day to day, and year to year-the everywhere, and for ever, hoeing and most patient, untirable, and persever- mowing, planting and cutting, weeding of animals. The English peasant ing and gathering. They have a is so cut off from the idea of property, succession of crops like a marketthat he comes habitually to look upon gardener. They have their carrots, it as a thing from which he is warned poppies, hemp, flax, saintfoin, lucerne, by the laws of the large proprietors, rape, colewort, cabbage, rotabaga, and becomes, in consequence, spirit- black turnips, Swedish and white turless, purposeless. The German nips, teazles, Jerusalem artichokes, bauer, on the contrary, looks on the mangel-wurzel, parsnips, kidney-beans, country as made for him and his field-beans and peas, vetches, Indian fellow-men. He feels himself a man; corn, buckwheat, madder for the manuhe has a stake in the country, as good facturer, potatoes, their great crop of as that of the bulk of his neighbours; tobacco, millet-all, or the greater part, no man can threaten him with ejec- under the family management, in their tion, or the workhouse, so long as he own family allotments. They have is active and economical. He walks, had these things first to sow, many of therefore, with a bold step; he looks them to transplant, to hoe, to weed, to you in the face with the air of a free clear off insects, to top; many of them man, but of a respectful one." to mow and gather in successive crops. They have their water-meadows, of which kind almost all their meadows are, to flood, to mow, and reflood; watercourses to reopen and to make anew; their early fruits to gather, to bring to market with their green crops of vegetables; their cattle, sheep, calves, foals, most of them prisoners, and poultry to look after; their vines, as they shoot rampantly in the sum*Rural and Domestic Life of Germany + Ibid. v. 50.

Of their industry, the same writer thus further speaks: "There is not an hour of the year in which they do not find unceasing occupation. In the depth of winter, when the weather permits them by any means to get out of doors, they are always finding something to do. They carry out their manure to their lands while the frost is in them. If there is not frost, they are busy cleaning ditches and felling old fruit trees, or such as do not bear well. Such of them as are too poor to

P. 44.

mer heat, to prune, and thin out the leaves when they are too thick: and any one may imagine what a scene of incessant labour it is."

This interesting sketch, to the general truth of which any observant traveller in that highly cultivated and populous region can bear witness, accords with the more elaborate delineation by a distinguished inhabitant, Professor Rau, in his little treatise "On the Agriculture of the Palatinate."* Dr. Rau bears testimony not only to the industry, but to the skill and intelligence of the peasantry; their judicious employment of manures, and excellent rotation of crops; the progressive improvement of their agriculture for generations past, and the spirit of further improvement which is still active. "The indefatigableness of the country people, who may be seen in activity all the day and all the year, and are never idle, because they make a good distribution of their labours, and find for every interval of time a suitable occupation, is as well known as their zeal is praiseworthy in turning to use every circumstance which presents itself, in seizing upon every useful novelty which offers, and even in searching out new and advantageous methods. One easily perceives that the peasant of this district has reflected much on his occupation: he can give reasons for his modes of proceeding, even if those reasons are not always tenable; he is as exact an observer of proportions as it is possible to be from memory, without the aid of figures: he attends to such general signs of the times as appear to augur him either benefit or harm."t

The experience of all other parts of Germany is similar. "In Saxony," says Mr. Kay, "it is a notorious fact, that during the last thirty years, and since the peasants became the proprietors of the land, there has been a rapid and continual improvement in the condition of the houses, in the manner of living, in the dress of the peasants,

*On the Agriculture of the Palatinate, and particularly in the territory of Heidelberg. By Dr. Karl Heinrich Rau, Heidelberg,

1830.

† Rau, pp. 15, 16.

and particularly in the culture of the land. I have twice walked through that part of Saxony called Saxon Switzerland, in company with a German guide, and on purpose to see the state of the villages and of the farming, and I can safely challenge contradiction when I affirm that there is no farming in all Europe superior to the laboriously careful cultivation of the valleys of that part of Saxony. There, as in the cantons of Berne, Vaud, and Zurich, and in the Rhine provinces, the farms are singularly flourishing. They are kept in beautiful condition, and are always neat and well managed. The ground is cleared as if it were a garden. No hedges or brushwood encumber it. Scarcely a rush or thistle or a bit of rank grass is to be seen. The meadows are well watered every spring with liquid manure, saved from the drainings of the farm yards. The grass is so free from weeds that the Saxon meadows reminded me more of English lawns than of anything else I had seen. The peasants endeavour to outstrip one another in the quantity and quality of the produce, in the preparation of the ground, and in the general cultivation of their respective portions. All the little proprietors are eager to find out how to farm so as to produce the greatest results; they diligently seek after improvements; they send their children to the agricultural schools in order to fit them to assist their fathers; and each proprietor soon adopts a new improvement introduced by any of his neighbours."* If this be not overstated, it denotes a state of intelligence very different not only from that of English labourers but of English farmers.

Mr. Kay's book, published in 1850, contains a mass of evidence gathered from observation and inquiries in many different parts of Europe, together with attestations from many distinguished writers, to the beneficial effects of pea

*The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and Europe; showing the Results of the Primary Schools, and of the division of Landed Property in Foreign Countries. By Joseph Kay, Esq., M.A. Barrister-at-Law, and late Travelling Bachelor of the University of Cambridge. Vol. i. pp. 138-40.

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