shepherdess seen from the railway was the symbol of the economic condition of a region whose fields are untilled for want of strong arms, which has no retail trade, even of the commonest articles of clothing, and which is unable to man the railway it has gotten at last, or even, if the expression may be pardoned, to woman it adequately. La Creuse is one of sixteen departments of which the population has decreased under the empire in every arrondissement; the number of its inhabitants is actually less at this moment than it was before the Revolution, even according to the official enumeration, which is far from showing the real depopulation, since, as before stated, the greater part of the grown men are absent most part of the year. Describing in 1856 the effects of the public expenditure upon building in Paris, added to the blood-drain of the army, M. de Lavergne declared from personal knowledge, 'La Creuse and the adjoining department of La Limousin, from which the masons are brought, have scarcely any able-bodied men. Cultivation is literally suspended.' In that year the number of masons brought from La Creuse alone was estimated at 50,000, out of a total population of 279,000 of all ages and sexes: in 1866, the total had decreased to 274,000; it is now further reduced, and a doubled conscription threatens to consummate the depopulation of the department.*

When M. de Lavergne, in an Essay on Peace,' published in 1855, sarcastically remarked, that if it be a fine thing to have 500,000 men under arms, it would be a much finer thing to have a million,' he probably did not foresee that it would come to be thought so. The Emperor himself probably did foresee it, since his published works show that he meditated it long before the Empire.

The levy of 100,000 fresh conscripts a-year falls of necessity chiefly on the rural population, because the peasants are too poor to purchase exemption. Threequarters of the men who have died in the service in the last twenty years, three-quarters of the men still under the colours, M. de Lavergne affirms, have come from the country, adding that 'peasant property is the chief sufferer, for a poor cultivator whose son is taken from him is ruined.' Accordingly the decline of the rural population of France is ascribed by M. de Lavergne chiefly to the military drain: Par là s'explique la plus grande partie du vide, l'émigration ne vient qu'après.'* But La Creuse suffers under imperial rule more than most other departments, for while it must contribute its full quota to the military contingent, it loses a yet larger part of its best strength by emigration to the capital. There are, indeed, people in France who, following English precedent, explain all the movements of labour by demand and supply, the tendency of wages to an equality, &c., and who are ready to argue that the peasantry follow their own interests in going to the towns, and that it must therefore be the best thing for the country. There is, they urge, a demand for builders in Paris, and a supply of poor labourers well fitted for building in La Creuse, where there is no demand for their labour; wages are much higher in the capital than in remote parts of the country; emigration is the process by which they are raised in the latter to the metropolitan level. But the truth is that the old formula of demand and supply

'L'Enquête agricole.' Rev. des Deux Mondes, Nov. 15, p. 409.

never explains anything: it merely states over again in vague general terms the facts it is put forward to explain. Why is there so great a demand for building in Paris? Why none in La Creuse? Why are wages so much lower in the latter than in the former? How can the emigration of labourers create capital and profitable employment behind them? On each side of La Creuse lie flourishing industrial cities-on its eastern border Montluçon, the entrepôt of a great coal basin; on its western border Limoges, 'the potteries' of France; yet no emigration takes place to either, nor does the one solitary seat of manufacture in La Creuse itself, Aubusson, obtain any increase of population from the country around it. In political constitution and in system of government lies the real explanation of many economic phenomena both in England and France, which political economy, treated as 'a deductive science,' can never explain.

'It starts,' we are told, from the principle that every man knows his own interest best, and if let alone will pursue it, and it follows that principle out into all its ramifications.'*

But what is the interest of

an Imperial Government? Does an emperor always know his own interest best? And if he follows it into all its ramifications, how are the interests of the country he governs likely to be affected? One-third of the whole expenditure of the State, it has been computed, takes place in Paris; another third in other large towns; but one-third, therefore, is left for all the rest of the country, from which the whole is mainly derived. * 'Spectator,' Oct. 10, 1868.

Comparing the relative public burdens of country and town, M. de Lavergne finds that the former bears threefourths of the taxation-furnishes three-fourths of the troops and gets one-third of the expenditure; and dividing, again, the country into two regions, it is found that the half in which La Creuse is situated has only one-third of the railways and roads. Again, in one year, of which we have the official statistics, the public expenditure in Paris is set down at upwards of 31,000,000l., in La Creuse at 150,000l. Not a regiment is stationed at La Creuse, while its scanty resources and labour are heavily taxed to garrison Paris, as well as to build its new streets. Then how can the emigration of their own sons and brothers, to build those new streets, enable the peasantry of La Creuse to compete in the labour market with an Imperial employer, who has unlimited command over funds to which they are themselves compelled to contribute? Or, how is the capital of the manufacturer in Aubusson increased by the outlay by M. Haussmann and Marshal Niel of millions in Paris? On the contrary, the expenditure in the metropolis of funds collected by loans and taxation from all parts of the country, has prevented the construction of railways, roads, and other muchrequired public works, in remote parts of the country, which would have led to the influx of improvements and capital, and a rise in the prices of produce, by which the demand for labour and the rate of wages would have been raised in La Creuse. As it is, looking to historical evidence of the condition, in former centuries, of the whole central region, of which La Creuse is now

by far the poorest part, M. de Lavergne does not hesitate to pronounce that it would have been better for the whole centre had the rest of France disappeared in a cataclysın. The inhabitant of Paris eats, on the average, ten times as much meat as an inhabitant of La Creuse or La Corréze, and much better meat. The Parisian eats the best wheaten bread, and drinks wine every day, whilst both are almost unknown to the peasant of La Creuse. In the reign of Francis I., on the contrary, the comparative condition of the central provinces (of which La Creuse appears to have been the happiest) was thus described by a writer whose report M. de Lavergne fully accepts :-Les provinces intérieures ont les mœurs plus douces que les autres. Elles se nourrissent aussi beaucoup mieux. C'est du bœuf, du mouton, beaucoup de porc frais ou salé, du gibier, de la volaille, des fruits, toutes choses que le pays produit en abondance.'

*

It is sometimes contended, however, that the institution which causes the vast emigration of the French peasantry to the towns, from impoverished departments like La Creuse, is peasant proprietorship. How, it has been asked, is the owner of a few acres to make it worth a labourer's while to remain in his employment? Those who so argue forget that the number of small properties not only places an equal number of men in a much happier position than they could occupy as labourers for hire, † and makes a better provision than

Économie rurale de la France,' p. 406.

In the concluding part of his work on the rural economy of France, summing up its general results, M. de Lavergne says of the small properties Deux millions possèdent en moyenne 6 hectares. Ceux-là