AGRICULTURE.
The agriculture of France is in a very different state from that of England or Scotland, being mark. ed by a degree of blickwardness, not a little surpris ing in a country so far advanced in many depart ments of art and science. The causes, however, an not difficult of explanation. France never enjoyed, till lately, the advantage of a representative body ; and the condition of the peasantry was long far inte rior to that of the same class in England. No ecclesi astical reformation had taken place, to remove a valu able part of the national territory out of the hands of indolent life-occupants ; and the grand: seigneurs, the other great body of landholders, devoted their atten tion to Paris and Versailles, without bestowing a thought on their lands or their tenantry, except to ex tract from them the means of defraying their expences in the capital. To this was addeda system of taxation, less heavy indeed than that to which we are subject ed in England, but extremely crude and impolitic, as evinced in the gabelle, or tax on salt used in pri. vete families, and in the corvie, or obligation on the peasantry to labour 'on the high roads. To these were joined the humiliating enactments of the ganie laws, and the more substantial injury of tithes ; for the clerical- body in France levied this pernicious as sessment as in England, though possessing, in pro perty, lands of the computed rent of five millions Sterling. • Another great drawback on- French agriculture was the insignificant size of the occupancies, wbe. Cher held as farms or in property. A French agri:. culturist, on a small scale, has little idea of selling his paternal acres, and converting the amount into& capital for a farm. He is much more likely to go on as the proprietor of eight or ten acres of land, and the cultivator of as many more. The mode of paying rent was equally singular: money-rents were gene ral only in the north or most fertile parts of France; they did not, on the whole, exist in more than a fifth or sixth of the kingdom before the Revolution. A more frequent species of tenure was by a grant made under a reservation of a fine— of a quit rent—or of certain servitudes, of which the least burdensome were sending corn to the mill, or grapes to the press of the proprietor. But of all indications of poverty and backwardness, the most striking was the system of metairie describ ed by Dr Smith ; a practice, by which a tenant, having little capital of his own, receives from the proprietor the live-stock and implements neces sary for cultivating his petty tenure, and divides with him its produce. This wretched method was,
and still is common, not in the north or north-east of France, but in many of the poorer districts of the centre and south. There are, it is to be remarked, several distinctions in this system ; the landholder, in some parts, providing only half the cattle and seed ; in others, the whole. There is, of course, a corresponding difference in the apportionment of the produce.
La Revolution a eti folic pour le eultivateur is a common saying in France ; indeed, that great convul sion improved so much the situation of the agricultu rists by cancelling, at one decisive blow, the tithes, the game laws, the eorvie, and other relics of feudal servitude, that, after all the horrors of Jacobinisre, and all the tyranny of Bonaparte, the escape from former degradation still preserves an attachment to the Revolution among this pacific class. Far. ther, the sale of the church lands transferred a valuable mass of property from indolent into active But with this we must terminate our eulogy on the Revolution, the farther progress made by agriculture, having been caused, less by any pad*. cal change, than by the gradual effect of experience and diffusion of information. The degree of agri cultural improvement in France since the Revolu tion has certainly been less than in England and Scotland, and in one very material point, that me morable convulsion has tended to retard it ; we mean by that law (suggested by a jealousy of the as cendancy of the noblesse) which obliges the owner of property, whether in land or money, to make an almost equal division of it among his children. The parent of two children has the free disposal of only one-third of his property ; the parent of three children of only one-fourth ; the residue being shar ed equally among all. The claim of primogeniture is thus in a manner annulled ; and a law, apparent ly wise and equitable, proves the source of great in jury to agriculture, by multiplying the petty lots of land throughout a country where they were already far too numerous.