Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/17

Rh M. Charles Lesage proves that when wheat paid an import duty of three francs, the Frenchman paid three francs seventy centimes more on his wheat than did his neighbor of England; and when the duty was raised to five francs, the price of wheat in France was again six francs ten centimes higher than in England. “Thus the three-franc duty cost the country 300,000,000, and the five-franc duty 500,000,000, while it brought in 60,000,000 only to the treasury.” In a country where the cost of government is advancing by leaps and bounds, and the population is stationary or nearly so, the question of additional burdens of indirect taxation is a serious one for the legislator. But this form of taxation is one of the simplest and readiest means of offering encouragement to agriculture through a restriction of foreign competition, and the remarkable stability of wheat area in France is at once proof of the conservative qualities of the peasant and the general distribution of wheat cultivation throughout the country. Of the eighty-seven departments into which France is divided only four produced more than 2,500,000 hectolitres of wheat. Reporting in 1896, the official representative of the agricultural districts complacently remarked that the home crop was about equal to the home consumption—a complacency rudely disturbed in 1897, when large importations became necessary.

France is an excellent example of a combination of circumstances favoring the culture of wheat in the face of unfavorable conditions. Wheat is a necessity, and is grown everywhere as a usual and almost necessary crop, apart from its commercial aspect. The farmer puts down each year a certain amount of land under wheat for his own consumption, and would continue to do so even if it happened (a most unlikely supposition) that wheat should sell for one third its present price. With this personal and necessary crop the farmer obtains food, a stock for seed, and usually a small surplus for sale, even from the smallest of wheat farms. It has occurred many times that a slightly higher price for wheat has called out unexpectedly large quantities from the hands of the small farmers of France, quantities that have been saved through indifference to sales or through supposed necessities, .now set aside by the chance of reaping a profit. And what has happened before will happen again among so thrifty a nation of land cultivators as are the French.

In addition to this necessity for growing wheat the division of land must be counted as a favoring factor. Recent returns on this head show that in France the total area under cultivation is 49,561,-861 hectares, divided into 5,672,000 plots or farms. Even on a general average this area and division will afford a small farm to each holder, one suited to intensive operations only. But nearly