Page:Principles of Political Economy Vol 1.djvu/630

608 not happening in England; as if it was not a necessary condition of an improved rotation of crops, that other cultures should increase in a greater proportion than grain culture, and even at the expense, in some degree, of the inferior kinds of grain.

We have admitted, and again admit, the unsatisfactory state of cultivation on a very great portion of the soil of France; but would it be any better if the estates were large? Is it any better now on the large estates? When M. Rubichon and his reviewer talk of the small properties as "creating a new Ireland in France," his own pages make it known that the large properties, in the backward parts of France, are already an Ireland, in the very worst feature of Irish landed mismanagement, the system of middlemen. It is a general practice, according to M. de Châteauvieux, with the great proprietors of the central departments, to let their land en bloc, to a middleman, usually an attorney or a notary, who sublets it in small portions on the métayer system, and is not only, as in Ireland, the hardest and most grasping of landlords, but having only a temporary tenure, and being no agriculturist, of course expends nothing in improvements. Of fifty-seven millions of acres cultivated by tenants, twenty-one millions are held only by farmers at fixed rents, and thirty-six millions on the métayer tenure; which in France implies all the defects, with very few of the advantages, of proprietary cultivation; the only exceptions being La Vendée and a few of the adjoining departments, where the large proprietors are resident, a primitive relationship subsists between them and their tenants, and the métayers have in general, as in Tuscany, a virtual fixity of tenure. We do not believe it will be found in any part of France that the small properties are under a bad agriculture, and the large properties under a good one. They are both bad, or both good. Where large farms exist and are well cultivated, the small properties also are well managed and prosperous.

And this brings us to the principal cause, both now and formerly, of the unimproved agriculture and scanty application of capital to the soil of France. This is, the exclusive taste of the wealthy and middle classes for town life and town pursuits, combined with the general want of enterprise of the French nation with respect to industrial improvements. It is truly, though epigrammatically, said by M. Rubichon, that the Frenchman,