sole subject of taxation. Justice has been done upon that theory by later generations of political economists; but, after all, the best reductio ad absurdum was made, at the epoch of its first appearance, by the comic deductions drawn from it in Voltaire's 'Homme aux Quarante Ecus.'

With the great Revolution, the day of revenge for ages of isolation and oppression might seem to have dawned on the cultivators of the French soil. And so it did, as far as the range of their own conceptions went; since they found themselves encouraged by the revolutionary movements of the capital-followed when they had not been preceded by the other great towns-to wreak their smouldering sense of wrong in wide-spread outrage and violence on the personal representatives of the system under which they had suffered;-to shake off the feudal and fiscal burthens which had weighed so heavily on their shoulders;— and to seize the opportunity of acquiring, at a nominal price, the lands thrown into the market by the extensive confiscations of ecclesiastical and emigrant property. It is a mistake, indeed, to suppose that the widely-prevalent division of landed property amongst petty proprietors, now existing in France, first originated at the Revolution: It is now known,' observes M. Léonce de Lavergne, 'that the numbers of petty landed proprietors have been much less increased since the Revolution than had been imagined.' Arthur Young, writing in 1789, states: The number is so great, that I am inclined to suppose more than one-third of the kingdom occupied by them.' M. Léonce de Lavergne, an eminent practical agricultural authority, affirms that there is not a greater extent so occupied now.

This vast body of petty peasant proprietors, who, under the old régime had been the most embarrassed and burdened class in the country, was the class that profited most immediately by the Revolution. While the depreciated assignats virtually wiped out their debts, the purchases of land, paid for in assignats, increased their property, and the famine prices of their produce enriched them amidst general misery. Economically and materially, therefore, this was the class that gained most amidst the public confusion; while the bourgeoisie of the towns, who had shunned all contact with it, and shifted all their burthens on its shoulders, were the class that suffered most. But the same events, as Tocqueville has justly observed,* which were ruinous at the time to the bourgeoisie, 'tended ultimately to place power in its hands, and soon enabled it to convert a great part of the public fortune to its sole use.'

*Euvres Complètes,' vol. v. p. 286.

Politically,

Politically, the Revolution left the agriculturists no farther advanced than it found them, and, indeed, threw them back in point of public importance and influence, by decimating such natural chiefs as they had. The saying that 'La Révolution a désossé la France' was more applicable to the landed interest than to any other. True, its aristocratical backbone had stood it in little stead before the Revolution; but it may be said since to have had no backbone of class-organisation at all;-to have consisted mainly of scattered and isolated 'uncountry gentlemen,' destitute alike of all rural occupation and political importance, and of mere masses of manœuvriers propriétaires, as a writer before us terms the lowest class of peasant proprietors. This last is the single type to which the theorists of infinite divisibility of land would willingly reduce all landed property-a type politically powerless, as necessitating all but total absorption in manual labour-with no ambition but that of annexing, by hook or crook, by toiling or borrowing, another bit of land to cultivate without skill or capital-with no politics but hazy traditions of taille and corvées, and instinctive devotion to the dynasty of the Napoleons, as somehow connected with their liberation from those old oppressions, and somehow securing Jacques Bonhomme against the still dreaded spectre of their

return.

*

The rule we shall proceed upon, in attempting to give English readers some notion of the present situation of French agriculture, in its main bearings on the entire industrial and social economy of France, is to assume only such evils existing in that situation as we find explicitly recognised in the official Report before

It may safely be taken for granted that the high-placed author of that Report would be rather disposed to extenuate than set down aught in malice of the actual condition of the important interest concerned. And, in fact, M. Monny de Mornay does his best, as in official duty bound, to palliate the darker traits of that condition which have been brought out in evidence; and contents himself, for the most part, with enume

M. Léonce de Lavergne, in his 'Economie Rurale de la France' (p. 371), gives the following description of the actual condition of these manœuvriers propriétaires:-The population of the Puy-de-Dôme has increased since 1789 from 400,000 to 600,000 souls or upwards. Before the Revolution, thirty-seven farms, of an average extent of 80 or 100 acres, divided between them the territory of the commune of Vensat. At the present day, the same surface belongs to six hundred proprietors, possessing on an average less than 6 acres. The middle class has disappeared from the district; the whole population cultivates the soil by manual, mostly spade labour-a painful toil, drawing after it rough and violent manners. The inhabitant of the Limagne is extremely laborious, but his effective industry by no means equals his bodily activity. The return of grain rarely much exceeds 2 bushels the acre.'

rating the various remedial measures which have been suggested, without committing himself or his department to a choice amongst those measures. There are only two points on which M. Monny de Mornay hazards a decided judgment—and these are, the progress made by French agriculture within the last thirty years, and the ratification explicitly or implicitly given by French agriculturists to the abolition of Protection on their staple products of corn and cattle. Upon the former of these points it is remarked by a leading agricultural authority already cited, that it is very true that French agriculture has made great progress during the last thirty years, but that the review of that progress should have been extended to at least fifty. During the last half century French agriculture has doubled its products; but, during the twenty years succeeding the Revolution of February, 1848, agricultural progress has been very sensibly slackened. The proper business of the Enquête was to investigate, and to endeavour to trace to its causes, the slackened progress of that latter period.

We do not purpose to follow the formal order of the Report before us, but to group together such of the topics of its successive chapters as appear to us naturally connected with each other, and likely to interest English readers, and to gather illustrations of those topics from some of the more prominent works, which have proceeded of late years from the pens of French authors practically conversant with agricultural and social subjects.

Our readers may require some introduction to the authors whom we shall have chiefly to cite in illustration of our present subject. We begin with the one least likely to be previously known to them-M. d'Esterno; the scope of whose work, as may be partly gathered from its title, is to show how privilege, when supposed to be slain in the overthrow of the old privileged classes, only transmigrated into new forms-forms still oppressive, though less unequally and iniquitously oppressive to agriculture. M. d'Esterno is not only an agricultural statistician, but a philosopher and humourist; his humour sometimes a little getting the upper hand of his philosophy. He is, as he allows to peep out, by descent a member of the old privileged class. There have always been, he says, members of that class, who have disapproved the enforced obligation of idleness on the old noblesse. For example, Dulaure (the historian of Paris) cites a Sieur d'Esternod, gentilhomme et poëte under Louis XIII., who notwithstanding, or rather perhaps by reason of, that double

* Léonce de Lavergne, Revue des Deux Mondes,' November, 1868.

qualification,

qualification, found himself temporarily reduced to a state of embarrassment closely approaching indigence. Necessity inspired him with evil thoughts, which, he says, he resisted, but which he was not sorry, in his quality of poet, to make known to posterity in the following rhyming reflections, the style of which may account for the rest of his poetry having been 'let die.' 'Je maugréais mon être, et détestais, en somme, Le père qui m'avait fait naître gentilhomme, Disant que, si le ciel m'eut créé roturier,

Je saurais, misérable, au moins quelque métier.'

M. d'Esterno describes his two very noticeable volumes as the fruit of forty years of studies-studies which bear evidence of having been followed in the open air, fully as much as by lamplight. He has in former years taken an active part in the struggles of the agricultural interest with the powers that be, and the powers that have been, in favour of its representation in chambers of agriculture on a footing of equality with chambers of commerce. He ascribes the ill-success which has been experienced in effecting that object, and other objects in the pure interest of agriculture, to the manner in which that interest, under the elder Bourbons, mixed itself up with reactionary politics.

'It was on the lordship of land that the privileges of the old régime had been founded; the attempts made, under the Government of the Restoration, by the introduction of the double vote and other such measures, to render. the great landowners predominant in the elections, inspired universal distrust of all proposals from that quarter. When a new generation-our generation-arose, declaring that it took up the cause of agriculture solely as a productive interest, its representatives received no credence. They were answered, "You carry the same flag; you have put a new dye upon it, but the old colour still peeps through. You give yourselves out for agriculturists, but you are nothing better than aristocrats!"

'King Louis Philippe was deeply imbued with this prejudice. From his infancy he had found himself, and all related to him, objects of hostility to the old privilégiés of the soil; and he had conceived a profound aversion for the landed interest altogether, which he never succeeded in separating in his mind from its ci-devant representatives. Louis Philippe was the King of the tiers état, that is to say, of the bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and lawyers. He regarded with deep displeasure the establishment of the Central Congress of Agriculture in 1844; and, when it decided to hold regular annual sittings, the King flew into a violent rage, sent for the Duke Decazes, the zealous President of that Congress, and said, amongst other things, to him, “Do you think I have not enough of two Chambers, and that I want a third?" Those who wished to please him never talked to him

of

of agriculture. The Count de Gasparin sometimes tried to introduce the subject. This bored the King, who said one day to him."Voyons, M. de Gasparin, laissez-nous donc tranquille avec votre agriculture!""

M. Léonce de Lavergne, another of the authors we have selected for citation on this subject, is already known to agricultural inquirers in this country by a good English translation of his Essay on the Rural Economy of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with Notes by a Scottish Farmer.* M. de Lavergne was stopped short in the official and parliamentary career on which he had entered under the Orleans dynasty, by the events of February, 1848, and again in his professorial labours in the Chair of Rural Economy at the National Agronomical Institute, by its arbitrary suppression in 1852, in the first days of the Imperial Government. Its re-establishment in substance, if not in precise form, is now generally demanded. To this demand the Government, it is said, consents; and a Commission, nominated by the Minister of Agriculture, has prepared a project which fixes the seat of the new institute at Paris. And thus the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges.' M. Léonce de Lavergne might briefly be described as the Arthur Young of France, and he would certainly take the description as a compliment. Like his British precursor, an experienced agriculturist and acute observer of the practical bearings of public policy or impolicy on the progress or decline of agriculture, he has repeated, under less perturbed circumstances, Arthur Young's task of 1789, that of examining the actual condition of agricultural and pastoral production in each of the great natural divisions of the French territory, and of forming a comparative estimate of their products with those of this country. Like Arthur Young, he keeps his eyes resolutely fixed on the soil, and regards political vicissitudes chiefly as they affect the every-day interests of its cultivators.

While from these antecedents M. de Lavergne might be supposed likely to fall naturally into the rôle, more or less, of a frondeur of the powers that be, M. Le Play-who figures last, not least, on our list for citation-may be supposed, as an International Exhibition Commissioner, a Councillor of State, and finally a Senator, not less naturally to rank among the satisfaits of the Second Empire. But he is none the less disposed to be severely

'Essai sur l'Economie Rurale de l'Angleterre, de l'Ecosse et de l'Irlande, par M. Léonce de Lavergne. Quatrième édition.' Paris, 1863. We would also refer our readers to an excellent criticism of this work by Mrs. Grote, in her 'Collected Papers (London, 1862), an essay which, on many accounts, deserves and will repay attentive perusal.

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