les gains du jeu, les ambitions fiévreuses, et possède encore les mâles vertus et les instincts productifs de ses pères. Laissez-le faire; il vous rendra bien vite, sans faste et sans bruit, sinon ce que vous avez perdu, du moins ce que peuvent créer des richesses nouvelles, le travail et l'économie. Si les autres classes de la société française, riches, bourgeois, artisans de villes, valaient pour leurs rôles ce que Jacques Bonhomme vaut pour le sien, ce n'est pas l'Angleterre, c'est la France qui serait depuis longtemps le premier peuple de l'univers.'*

283

A SECOND VISIT TO LA CREUSE.

The author has elsewhere remarked that the land system of France cannot be estimated fairly without reference to the political conditions under which it has been tried. And of all the departments of France, La Creuse presents the most striking example of their influence. An extreme instance, it is true, it is nevertheless a typical one of the obstacles which the policy of the last eighteen years has opposed to the tendencies of the age to carry rapid improvement into the most backward rural localities; while it illustrates also the effects of earlier misgovernment. The cardinal doctrine of the first authority on French rural economy in the lectures, of which the suppression of his Chair in 1852 prevented the oral delivery, is that the town is the most powerful agent in improving the country.* He has lived to see the influence of the town pass like a pestilence over his own department, depopulating its villages, and leaving its fields to relapse into waste. The number of men and boys migrating annually to the capital and other large towns for the greater part of the year has been generally computed in the department itself at about one-fifth of the entire population; and even official reports refer this enormous. migration to the extravagant expenditure on building in Paris and other great cities by the Government, and the municipal authorities carrying out Government policy.

The first transformation of the simple peasant of La Marche-the old province with which La Creuse is nearly coextensive into a builder of palaces is not indeed to be laid to the charge of the present empire; and the report of the 'Enquête agricole' in the few tardy pages which, out of many thousands in its numerous volumes, have been devoted to La Creuse, alludes not without truth to an 'émigration séculaire et traditionnelle;' though it does not refrain from adding that 'the current which carries its population to the towns has now assumed an alarming intensity.' The movement began, however, more than two centuries ago with the architectural splendour of an earlier despotism at Versailles. In a still earlier age the peasantry of France were accustomed to gather into the nearest towns for security from pillage; and the invasions of the English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, followed by civil war in the sixteenth and seventeenth, caused a continuous aggregation round local centres. But that was local concentration, not emigration, and the last half of the reign of Henry IV, 'the only king France ever loved,' afforded an interval of tranquillity and prosperity to the country which was

followed at once by diminished crowding to the towns, and the growth of numerous villages. Brief was that period of sunshine for the peasant. On him fell the burden alike of the pomp and luxury of despotism, of its wars of stupid ambition, of its blunders in legislation, administration, and finance, and of its drain of all the wealth of the country to the capital. The immigration of the noble and even the middle class consequent on its policy of centralisation was of necessity followed by an immigration of labourers and mendicants seeking subsistence. The servile obligations which bound them to the soil, the difficulties of the road, the obstacles to employment created by trade guilds and regulations of industry, the prohibitory edicts of the kings-alarmed at the growth of Paris, without perceiving either its causes or its real danger-their own miserable poverty, and their physical and mental prostration from hunger and suffering, forbade the less energetic of the peasantry to wander from their villages and huts, but the more vigorous and enterprising forced their way to the cities. 'Ceux qui résistent,' wrote Quesnay of the effects of the sufferings and insufficient food of the country population, 'qui conservent la santé, et acquièrent des forces, qui ont de l'intelligence, se délivrent de cet état malheureux en se répandant dans les villes. Les plus débiles, les plus ineptes, restent dans les campagnes, où ils sont aussi inutiles à l'État qu'à charge à eux-mêmes.' The poorest by nature and the most isolated of all the provinces was La Marche, but its pure air and water and their own simple virtues gave its inhabitants hardy frames, and fitted them for labours requiring both strength and dexterity. After the building of Versailles they continued accordingly to furnish Paris with its chief supply of masons and bricklayers, and a genius for building became hereditary in the men of La Marche or La Creuse.* Between 1815 and 1848, the average number of emigrants-using the word in the French sense-was computed at little short of 25,000. But in place of doubling that number, the last twenty years ought to have greatly diminished it-by opening up the resources of the department; by enlarging local employment and raising wages; by lowering the cost of cultivation, while adding to the value of its fruits; and cheapening imports to the consumer, while enhancing the prices of exports for the producer.

It is nowhere disputed that there have been causes which have caused an immigration from many rural districts in France into the large towns. New manufactures and increasing trade have offered employment, and new facilities for migration have given easier access. But this natural immigration was in itself a sufficient reason for not adding an artificial one. The Creuse peasant moreover has never taken to manufactures or trade; he loved at all times his village better than the city, as his annual return to it for the winter, and his final return for the rest of his life, gave proof; and he was too robust a foot-traveller to dwell on the difficulty or the ease of the journey. Sheer