On the other hand, farmers from this time have ceased to be labourers ; and below them has of course been form ed a class of men of toil, who, being entrusted with sup porting the whole nation by their labour, are the real pea sants, the truly essential part of the population. The peasantry, strengthened by the kind of labour most natural to man, are perpetually required for recruiting all the other classes; it is they who must defend the country in a case of need ; whom it most concerns us to attach to the soil where they were born ; and policy itself would invite every government to render their lot happy, even though humanity did not command it.
• When the system of small farms has been compared, as is often done, with that of great farms, it has not been suf ficiently considered that the latter, by taking the direction of his labour out of the peasant's hands, reduces him to a condition greatly more unhappy than almost any other system of cultivation. In truth, hinds performing all the labours of agriculture, under the command of a rich far mer, are not only more dependent than metayers, but even than serfs, who pay their capitation or their service. The latter, whatever vexations they experience, have at least a hope, a property, and a heritage to leave their children. But the hind has no participation in property, nothing to hope from the fertility of the soil or the pro pitiousness of the season ; he plants not for his children; he entrusts not to the ground the labour of his young years, to reap the fruit of it, with interest, in his old age. He lives each week on the wages of the last. Ever ex posed to the want of work by derangements in his mas ter's fortune; ever ready to feel the extremes of want, from sickness, accident, or even the approaches of old age, he runs all the risks of ruin without enjoying any of the chances of fortune. Economy in his situation is scarcely probable; but though he should succeed in collecting a little capital, the suppression of all intermediate ranks hinders him from putting it to use. The distance be tween his lot and that of an extensive farmer, is too great for being passed over ; whereas, in the system of cultiva tion on the smallocale, a labourer may succeed, by his little economy, in acquiring a small farm or a small me tairie ; from this he may pass to a greater, and from that to every thing. The same causes have suppressed all the intermediate stages in other departments of industry. A gulf lies between the day-labourer and every enterprise of manufacture or trade, as well as farming ; and the lower classes have now lost that help which sustained them in a former period of civilization. Parish aids, which are secured to the day-labourer, increase his de pendence. In such a state of suffering and disquietude, it is not easy to preserve the feeling of human dignity, or the love of freedom ; and thus at the highest point of modern civilization, the system of agriculture approxi mates to that of those corrupt periods of ancient civilization, when the whole labour of the field was performed by slaves.
The state of Ireland, and the convulsions to which that unhappy country is continually exposed, show clearly enough how important it is for the repose and security of the rich themselves, that the agricultural class, which forms the great majority of a nation, should enjoy conve niences, hope, and happiness. Thg Irish peasants are
ready to revolt, and plunge their country into the horrors of civil war; they live each in a miserable hut, on the produce of a few beds of potatoes, and the milk of a cow; more unhappy, at the present day, than the cottagers of England, though possessing a small property, of which the latter are destitute. In return for their allotted portion of ground, they merely engage to work by the day, at a fixed wage, on the farm where they live ; but their com petition with each other has forced them to be satisfied with a wage of the lowest possible kind. A similar com petition will act likewise against the English cottagers. There is no equality of strength between the day-labourer, who is starving, and the farmer, who does not even lose the revenue of his ground, by suppressing some of his ha bitual operations; and hence the result of such a struggle between the two classes, is constantly a sacrifice of the class which is poorer, more numerous, and better entitled to the protection of law.
Rich proprietors generally find that for themselves large farms are more advantageous than small ones. The small farmer rarely employs a capital sufficient even for his lit tle cultivation; himself is always so near to ruin, that he must begin by ruining the ground. And certainly, in countries where the different systems of cultivation are practically set in opposition to each other, it is granted that land is ruined by letting it on lease, and reimproved by cultivating it with servants or metayers. It is not, therefore, small farms, but metairies, which ought to be compared with large farms. Cultivation, on the great scale, spares much time which is lost in the other way; it causes a greater mass of work to be performed in the same time, by a given number of men ; it tends, above all, to procure from the employment of great capitals the profit formerly procured from the employment of nume rous workmen ; it introduces the use of expensive instru ments, which abridge and facilitate the labour of man. It invents machines, in which the wind, the fall of water, the expansion of steam, are substituted for the power of limbs; it makes animals execute the work formerly executed by men. It hunts the latter from trade to trade, and con cludes by rendering their existence useless. Any saving of' human strength is a prodigious advantage, in a colony, where the supernumerary population may always be ad vantageously employed. Humanity justly solicits the em ployment of machines to aid the labour of' the negroes, who cannot perform what is required of them, and who used to be incessantly recruited by an infamous commerce. But in a country where population is already too abun dant, the dismissal of more than half the field-labourers is a serious misfortune, particularly at a time when a similar improvement in machinery causes the dismissal of more than half the manufacturing population of towns. The nation is nothing else but the union of all the individuals who compose it, and the progress of its wealth is illusory, when obtained at the price of general wretchedness and mortality.