Page:Principles of Political Economy Vol 1.djvu/637

Rh facts. This department fortunately possesses an accurate agricultural statistique for the year 1800, drawn up by a préfet who took great pains to be correct in his information. M. Passy's pamphlet is a comparison of these returns with those collected by the French Government in 1837.

In this interval of thirty-seven years, scarcely any new land was taken into cultivation, nearly all fit for culture having been already occupied. But fallows had diminished from 172,000 hectares to a little more than 80,000. The cultures which supply cattle had increased in a much greater proportion than any others: instead of 17 per cent of the cultivated area, they occupied 37 per cent. Horses had multiplied from 29,500 to 51,000, horned cattle from 51,000 to 106,000, sheep from 205,000 to 511,000, and as their food has increased in a still greater ratio, and there was importation besides, all kinds of live stock were better fed, and had gained in size, weight, and value. The produce per hectare of all kinds of grain, and of most other kinds of produce, had considerably increased, of some kinds nearly doubled. These changes had chiefly been effected during the second half of the period, so that the improvement was as progressive as on M. Rubichon's theory should have been the deterioration. There had been no perceptible variation in the proportion between the grande and the petite culture; nor had the division of properties at all promoted the division of farms. On the soils where small farms are most profitable, large properties are rented to small tenants; where the reverse is the case, a single farmer often rents the lands of several proprietors, and this arrangement extends itself more as the subdivision of property advances. The consumption of food per head of the population had largely increased—in the ratio, according to M. Passy, of about 37 per cent; and while the agricultural wealth of the department had increased, according to his estimate, by 54 per cent, the population had only increased 5 per cent.

Though the Eure belongs to the most productive and thriving region of France, it is not the most productive or the most thriving department. The Nord, which comprises the greater part of French