IV (2)

The agricultural survey of 1892 shewed that agricultural properties were held as follows:—

The number of tenant farmers has decreased, while the number of occupiers cultivating their own land exclusively has increased. The statistics of the census of 1901 give the number of independent cultivators of agricultural properties as having increased from 3,086,000 in 1896 to 3,469,000 in 1901. The survey of 1892 numbers 7,200,000 separate undertakings; a number of farmers and tenant farmers therefore cultivate two or more undertakings or properties.

M. Augé Laribé, a Socialist, who is the author of a book on vine-growing in the South of France, concludes that “on all points we find ourselves in the presence of contradictions and uncertainties.” We should be all the more anxious to congratulate him upon this admission seeing that Socialists have not accustomed us to so much modesty.

M. Briand says: “The ownership of his land is necessary to the agriculturist, and such ownership alone will protect him against his misfortunes.” But the Socialist idea, is the abolition of land as the property of the agriculturist, so that M. Briand in submitting the idea of peasant proprietorship is setting up an idea of political conservatism. Nevertheless he is mistaken if he believes that all the cultivators of the soil are anxious to possess their “instrument of labour.” Mr. Winfrey has given an account of an attempt at a home-colony which was made for fifteen years in the counties of Lincoln and Norfolk. He placed allotments of land, amounting in 1894 to 1,384 acres, at the disposal of a number of agricultural labourers. He reports that in order to save their small capital and to turn it to the best account they would rather rent their allotments than buy them.

Arthur Young, an English agriculturist, who studied agriculture in France from 1787 to 1789, said of his own countrymen at that time that any of them who possessed £200 “did not buy a piece of land, but rented it and equipped a good farm with the money.” Except in certain parts of the country, where cultivation on a small scale is rendered necessary by the nature of the soil or of what it produces, a French peasant with a piece of land worth such a sum finds it in his interest to sell it and devote the proceeds to the purchase of live stock, plant and improvements, and to rent a piece of land containing 20 or 30 hectares, instead of contenting himself with the two or three hectares which are the equivalent of such a capital sum. He can find an owner who will entrust him with a piece of land worth ten times the amount of his capital.

There is no other industry in which a capitalist on a small scale can obtain an investment of the same extent and with so small a liability. A farmer with method, good health and good management, and a wife with the same qualities, can bring up a family in conditions which are greatly superior than those which would have obtained had he been content with the piece of land of which he was originally the proprietor.

In spite of these advantages to the farmer, neither properties nor agricultural undertakings have tended to become concentrated in France, while German Socialists have been constrained to admit that the same observation holds good in their own country.