ship, a few extracts from M. de Lavaleye's very interesting work may not be out of place:—
'The larger (he says), the number of landowners in a country the more free and independent citizens there are concerned in the maintenance of public order. Property is the essential complement of liberty. Whatever rights the political constitution may confer upon him, so long as a man is a tenant he remains a dependent being—politically a man he is socially a bondsman. … Peasant property may be called the lightning conductor that averts from society dangers which might otherwise lead to violent catastrophes.'
Further on in the same work he lays down these self-evident truths agreed in by every economist who studies the question:—
'There are no measures more Conservative or more conducive to the maintenance of order in society than those which facilitate the acquirement of property in land by those who cultivate it; there are none fraught with more danger for the future than those which concentrate the ownership of the soil in the hands of a small number of families.[1]
I do not consider it necessary here to more than notice the palpably prejudiced accounts lately published by Lady Verney in the Contemporary Review of some peasant properties she happened, while on a holiday excursion in France, to visit. She saw in these few places what she considered, to her ideal, were uncleanliness, evidences of thriftlessness and misery, and thereupon, with truly feminine logic, 'with inductive impetuosity,' she frames an indictment against a system she was by training, by association, and by class-sympathy, entirely unfitted to examine and judge impartially of. How anyone could seriously and soberly regard such rambling utterances and 'wayside jottings' as of any economic value puzzles me. Every schoolboy knows, to quote a famous Macaulayan phrase, that in portions of France, through the operations of the law known as le partage forcé, the peasant properties were indefinitely sub-divided, and the tendency of course resulted in economic evils. With an ingenuity of
