the former the figures are o.11, 0.26, 0.93, 0.77.' The cultivation of Flanders is far superior to that of the eastern provinces. Of those provinces M. de Laveleye writes: "The Condroz [provinces of Namur and Liège] is the region of Belgium which counts the greatest number of large farms; those which reach 250 acres, so rare in the Flemish provinces, being met here often. enough. As soon as a farm is divided in Le Condroz the land is better cultivated and the number of cattle increases. The small proprietors who farm their own five or six acres know no fallow their crops are more varied and better kept; the produce is much larger; they raise beetroot, colza, and turnips; their corn is taller and carries more grain. Thus, then, a too large size of the farms is one cause of the inferiority of the farming in Condroz." " M. de Laveleye has compiled a table showing that the small-farm provinces, the Flanders, have more cattie, more produce, are more carefully cultivated, and have more agricultural capital than the provinces in which large farms predominate. In the table East Flanders is especially compared with Namur, and it is to be noticed that in the former the land poorer than in the latter province :

is

3

263

It is the same everywhere. In Lombardy, in the province of Como, where small farming prevails, the value of the cattle per hectare in cultivation is 161, whilst in the province of Mantua, with its large farms and fine pasture land, it is but 94 francs. In France agricultural land fetches higher prices than land of similar quality in England, and the reported average produce of France is diminished by including the inferior yield of large farms. Another error is the supposition that the division of land in France is solely due to the law of succession. It is largely owing to the fact that the French peasant is the

'Cobden Club Essays, 1870, p. 244. 2" Economie Rurale de la Belgique."

""La proprietâ fondiaria in Lombardia." Sig. Tacini.

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great buyer of land. Those who desire to reform the land-laws of the United Kingdom do not seek to introduce the French law of compulsory division. The English people take a commonplace view of the truth scientifically put by Sir Henry Maine, that in France "they have established a system of small perpetual entails which is infinitely nearer akin to the system of feudal Europe than would be a perfect liberty of bequest." We say that if the power of settling life-estates in land were abolished, if the transfer were made simple, decisive, and inexpensive by registration of indefeasible title upon a system like that established in Australia, including of course the registration of charges and mortgages, the consequences would be (1) an active competition for small lots of agricultural land, (2) a large increase of farming capital, (3) a great addition to the number of owners and a disposition to sell land in small lots, and (4) that the tendency, which is a grave political danger as well as a hindrance to production, towards a diminution in the number of landowners would thus be arrested and reversed.

We have seen that the distribution of land in the United Kingdom is not the result of economic laws. The large farms of England are far more productive than the large farms of the Continent, because they are better supplied with capital; but they produce less than the small farms of the Channel Islands, and less than many of the small farms of the Continent. The reason why these small farms are more productive is probably the same as that which makes the large farms of England produce more than those of the Continent. It is a question of capital. Frenchmen have been known to take a large farm with a capital of 10s. an acre, and we have it on high authority that £20 an acre would not be too much. It is probable that, in money or salable stock, British farmers have a capital considerably larger than that of the peasants of Jersey or Flanders. But the calculators who have upheld this opinion have for the most part forgotten to value the peasant and his family, who, toiling from morning till night, are certainly worth £500. It is moreover a common error to suppose that there is of necessity great economy in large agricultural operations, and that therefore a

1 "Ancient Law," chap. vii.

good income is easily earned in wages of superintendence" by large farmers. This is the mistake underlying that speech by Lord Derby to which reference has been made. He assumed that the small cultivator, honest, industrious, and frugal," was one who must always be in antagonism to the "combination of capital and science," just as is the hand-loom weaver, or the savage fighting with bow and arrow against breechloaders. But that is a fallacy. The combination of capital and science in the costly form of a steam threshing-machine is quite as universal among the small cultivators of Jersey and Flanders as in any part of England. The fact is that this combination has become too much for the large farmers. Each one of them does not and cannot purchase and maintain for himself a steamplough at £800, or a steam threshing-machine at £300. If ten small farmers join together to work a steam threshing-machine, as they do every day in Jersey, they may unite in laying their lands open to a steam-plough. And of this we may be sure, that the future of agriculture will tend to be divided betwixt hand-labor and steam-power-the spade and the steam-plough.

There is a wide difference between the labor and the cost of eight horses and those of an engine of eight horse-power. It is expensive to attempt and impossible to succeed in making eight horses pull all together and with continuously equal strain. This is, however, accomplished with perfect success by one hand upon a steam-engine. A horse, which costs at least 2s. for care and keep for five hours, cannot work longer than that time. Continued labor during five hours is a full day's work for horses at plough. A single horse-power in a steam-engine is in other words the evaporation of six gallons or sixty pounds of water per hour, and with an engine of good construction 12 pounds of coal, worth 5 farthings, will give a power equivalent to that of a horse costing 25. The general application of steam-power to the cultivation of the soil, and to the carriage of produce on country roads, may be deferred, but it must ultimately be accomplished; and perhaps the time is not very distant when it will appear as strange that a farmer of heavy land should allow his subsoil to be injuriously trodden into a water-bearing stratum by four horses dragging a plough as that a Lancashire weaver should fill his sheds with hand-looms.

Before we quit the subject it would be well to glance at the work of Mr. James Howard, M.P., an eminent manufacturer of agricultural implements, and a careful though somewhat prejudiced inquirer into matters relating to "Continental Farming and Peasantry," which is the title of a book published by Mr. Howard in 1870. It deserves notice not only for its intrinsic merits, but because it was received with something like enthusiasm by those who are opposed to the ideas of the present writer. Subdivision in France is most notable in the north-west. But even in the Department of the North, about Valenciennes, Mr. Howard tells us there are farms of 400 to 600 acres; though we have the report of M. Hamoir, the best-known agriculturist of the province, to the effect that twenty-five acres are considered a large extent, and that ten acres may be taken as the average. M. Hamoir has known agricultural land in that part of France sell as high (to peasant proprietors) as £192 an acre. As usual with large farmers or proprietors, he deprecates such an outlay; he thinks it "better that the small farmer should not be a proprietor or landowner at the price he pays. Then M. Hamoir, using the very argument which is employed in England to prove that if we had free land the small capitalist would not buy, says: The interest of his money invested in ordinary securities would permit him to hire, even at a high rate, double the quantity of land that he could hold as an owner; but he does not enter upon this path." Now, here is a phenomenon! This French peasant, taxed all over the world with morbid thrift, with unnatural frugality, is told that he is reckless in the outlay of his painful savings, and the larger landowners and farmers in France and in other countries look upon him as a stubborn, contumacious animal, with a faculty for existing upon hard fare and for raising the price of land to unheard-of figures. Is this likely to be true? Is it reasonable to suppose that the people who generation after generation have put sou to sou and franc to franc, till a sum has been collected for a purchase, would be thus duped in their expenditure? M. Hamoir, to do him justice, is not so ignorant as to believe this. But he gives, in Mr. Howard's pages, a subordinate place to that which is the real and abundantly sufficient motive. These purchases are the result of prudence, not of ignorance. The peasants know that

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their unremitting labor will turn sand to gold, and that there is but one way to security-that of ownership. As M. Hamoir puts it, "the peasant fears the short duration of leases, at the end of which he fears to be ousted for some competitor." There it is; that is the whole story-the full confirmation of my argument. To be secure, the cultivator must be the proprietor.

In dealing with the cost of a landed gentry in the United Kingdom I have strictly confined myself to the tenure of land. I believe I have established in the minds of all who have given fair consideration to these statements a conviction that, with adequate reform, there would be a large increase in the homegrown supply of food and of all useful and beneficial enterprises connected with the land; that there would be farming proprietors, not established by force of any compulsory law of subdivision, but establishing themselves by natural selection of the fittest for such occupation, in which the right men could afford to give, and would be prepared to pay, much higher prices than are now obtained for agricultural land. I have myself no fear whatever that the dwindling in the number of agricultural landowners, which is now a dangerous feature of our social system, would not be arrested if the soil of the country were liberated from settlement and the transfer of land were secure and simple; and, as Mr. J. S. Mill has truly said, "whatever facilitates land passing into new hands tends to increase its productiveness, and thereby its usefulness, to the nation at large; since those among the owners who are least provided with skill, enterprise, and capital are those who are under the strongest inducements to sell their land."

ARTHUR ARNOLD.