Page:Peasant proprietary in Ireland; a rejoinder.djvu/22

, a few extracts from M. de Lavaleye's very interesting work may not be out of place:—

Further on in the same work he lays down these self-evident truths agreed in by every economist who studies the question:—

I do not consider it necessary here to more than notice the palpably prejudiced accounts lately published by Lady Verney in the Contemporary Review of some peasant properties she happened, while on a holiday excursion in France, to visit. She saw in these few places what she considered, to her ideal, were uncleanliness, evidences of thriftlessness and misery, and thereupon, with truly feminine logic, 'with inductive impetuosity,' she frames an indictment against a system she was by training, by association, and by class-sympathy, entirely unfitted to examine and judge impartially of. How anyone could seriously and soberly regard such rambling utterances and 'wayside jottings' as of any economic value puzzles me. Every schoolboy knows, to quote a famous Macaulayan phrase, that in portions of France, through the operations of the law known as le partage forcé, the peasant properties were indefinitely sub-divided, and the tendency of course resulted in economic evils. With an ingenuity of