Page:Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches by Anne Turgot.djvu/49

22 condition became proprietors and free, under the name of tenants or vassals; and the former proprietors, under the name of seigneurs, kept only the right of exacting the payment of the rent and the other stipulated dues. Thus have things gone in the greater part of Europe.

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Fourth method: the metayer system.

These estates, which have become free on condition of the payment of rent, may yet change their Proprietors, be divided and re-united in consequence of successions and sales; and such and such a Vassal may in his turn come to have more land than he can cultivate himself. As a rule the rent to which the estates are subject is not so large but that by cultivating them well there can still be procured, over and above the advances, the expenses and the subsistence of the Cultivator, an excess of produce which forms a revenue: henceforth the Vassal proprietor, also, is likely to desire to enjoy this revenue without labour and to have his estate cultivated by others. Moreover, most of the Seigneurs alienate only those parts of their possessions which are the least within their reach, and retain those which they can get cultivated with less expense. Cultivation by slaves being no longer practicable, the first means which offered itself, and the most simple, to induce free men to cultivate estates which do not belong to them, was to give up to them a portion of the fruits; a plan which would induce them to cultivate the land better than