man' of Ireland, and that the interest charged by the exacting creditor is more oppressive than any rent. This at one time appeared a very plausible argument against the scheme, but by a very careful examination into the facts of the case in France it is found to be without any foundation in fact. M. de Lavergne estimates 'the amount of debt on these lands at five per cent, on an average of their total value,' and the marked improvement that has taken place in the food, clothing, and habitations of the French people proves that they are neither impecunious nor improvident, but on the contrary, rising rapidly in the social and economic scale. That same eminent economist, from careful inquiry, arrived at the conclusion 'that the great estates of England were more heavily encumbered, acre for acre, than the peasant properties of France.'[1] And in a more intensified form of obligation, by a more weighty load of mortgage, are the Irish estates held until positively perhaps not one in 20,000,000 acres that form the area of the country is unmortgaged. France has had for only three-quarters of a century anything like liberty and less than half a century of tranquillity and industrial life, and yet within that relatively brief interval of a nation's life what great material progress she has made, what a triumph of economic truth her prosperous condition presents! To illustrate the character and extent of that progress I shall quote the following passage from a very interesting work on the French people by Mr. Leslie ('Cobden Club Essays,' 1881.) He says:
- ↑ In 1885 the mortgages on landed property in France amounted to 770 millions; in England to one billion six hundred million sterling!—Spectator, August 21st, '86.
