Page:Principles of Political Economy Vol 1.djvu/631

Rh, knows but one way of getting rich; namely, thrift. He does not understand sowing money freely to reap it largely. This is the true cause why, when large properties are sold, they bring the greatest price by being much subdivided. The peasants, thanks to the Revolution, to the small properties, and to their own unparalleled frugality, are able to purchase land, and their savings, together with the money which they imprudently borrow for the same purpose, are the only part of the wealth of the country which takes that direction. We are often told, that it does not answer to capitalists to buy land at the extravagant price which the passion of the peasantry for land induces them to give, amounting often to forty years' purchase. It does not answer to pay that price in order to live idly on the rent in Paris, or the large provincial towns. But if there was one particle of the spirit of agricultural improvement in the owners of the monied wealth which is so largely increasing in the manufacturing and commercial districts, few speculations would be more profitable than to buy land in many fertile and ill-cultivated parts of France, at even more than forty years' purchase of its wretchedly low rental, which would soon be doubled or trebled by the application of capital, with ordinary agricultural knowledge and enterprise. If the petite culture is half as wasteful and unprofitable as is pretended, the profit would be proportional of substituting the grande culture for it. But with a people who dislike rural pursuits, and in the pursuit of money-getting prefer the beaten ways, there can be little other farming than peasant farming.

cheval de bataille of M. Rubichon and his English followers against the petite propriété, is the cattle question; not without cause, since on this subject they have an indisputable basis of fact, however inadequate to sustain the superstructure they have raised upon it. The supply of butcher's meat to some of the principal towns, especially Paris, is less copious than formerly. It has increased greatly, but in a less ratio than the population. Of the fact there is no doubt, since on this point there are trustworthy statistics of the past as well as of the present. In 1789 the consumption of meat in Paris averaged 68 kilogrammes (150 lbs.) for each person;