Lime is the chief ameliorator of the granitic soil of the Creuse, and it is only one of many means of improved husbandry which the railways bring at much diminished cost. At the same time the farmer now gets a great addition to his profits in the price of his produce. The price of meat in the towns of the department has doubled in ten years; eggs are now selling at 1 franc 30 centimes the dozen at Aubusson, where residents remember the dozen as costing only the 30 centimes. The Abbé P. Labrune, Archiprêtre d'Aubusson, published last year a work on the migration from his department, which establishes by many striking facts the gain which might accrue to it from employing productively at home the labour which is unproductively lavished on Paris. At the gate of his own town, Aubusson, he points to some land the produce of which, fifteen years since, fetched but 60%., while in 1869 it fetched 600l. At Evaux, a much less considerable place, and farther from railway communication, Count de Montignac has now an income of 1,000l. a-year from an estate which twenty years ago brought him only 1201. In another instance, the value of the annual produce of land has risen from 36/. to above 3601. The Abbé argues from these and many more examples that the emigrants, almost all of whom are either small landowners, or their sons, could have earned more by their own farms and employment within the department than they have done in Paris.+

This is stated on information from the spot in the present month, February 1870.

The Abbé in his calculations of the relative wages in Paris and La

U

And while the Creuse peasant can sell almost everything he raises at greatly advanced prices as compared with former years, he can buy many things-implements of husbandry, articles of clothing, tea, sugar, and holiday wine, considerably cheaper than formerly. Instead, therefore, of the peasant having been drawn to the town, the town should have come to him; the streets of Paris, instead of luring him from his fields, ought to have been supplied with a part of their produce, and towns should have grown round him and rewarded his labours with a liberal home market. Yet Gueret, the capital, remains a mean country village, with a few large public buildings in the middle, and immediately surrounded by hills producing nothing richer than heather. Agricultural statistics show that La Creuse ranks far below even the most desert department of Brittany, both in the total value of its crops, and in the yield per hectare. But it ranks second among the departments for its number of sheep, and at the head of all for cattle and sheep together; an economic condition which, taken in connection with the absence of towns and manufactures, the small area under crops, and the emigration of the best strength of the population, affords a not uninstructive parallel to the condition of Ireland. Not the less is it so, that there is a broad contrast in the causes; for it Creuse puts the rate in the latter at two francs a day. The 'Agricultural Statistics' for 1861-2, published in 1868, put it at 1 franc 72 centimes. The present author, when in the department a few months ago, found different rates in different localities, and even within the same com

mune.

See on the great disparities of wages in France, Études sur la Monnaie.' Par Victor Bonnet, 1870. pp. 63–4.

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is not its land system which has depopulated La Creuse, and arrested both cultivation and trade. On the contrary, M. de Lavergne can say: Sans le lien de la propriété qui les retient, ils seraient tous partis.'

The Abbé P. Labrune earnestly warns the Government of the peril to itself from the sentiments prevalent among the army of workmen it has assembled in Paris. Immigrant workmen, he observes, have been mixed up with every revolution in Paris for a century. Among examples of the change which is taking place in the character and sentiments of the emigrants from the Creuse, he refers to one young man who, before going to Paris, was one of the most inoffensive in the commune. Now his language is: Il n'est besoin ni d'empereur, ni de rois, ni de juges, ni d'armées, ni de notaires, ni de prêtres, ni de ces gens qui ne font que gêner la liberté. Les propriétaires sont de grands voleurs, dignes de la corde; le moment est venu où on leur rendra justice.' The articles of this new creed may possibly not be all so very unsound as the worthy Abbé may think; although it is not one which promotes the stability of an Imperial Government. Unfortunately it confounds things.

M. Élie de Beaumont cites with approval in the Introduction to his work on the Geological Map of France,' a dictum of the great naturalist, Cuvier, respecting the influence of geological conditions on the life and thought of man, and the impossibility of the inhabitant of a region of barren granite, like La Creuse, becoming similar in habits and ideas to the occupant of a fertile limestone soil: Nos départemens granitiques

produisent sur tous les usages de la vie humaine d'autres effets que les calcaires; on ne se logera, on ne se nourrira, le peuple, on peut le dire, ne pensera jamais en Limousin ou en Basse-Bretagne, comme en Champagne ou en Normandie.' The railway which carries lime at a reduction of 50 per cent. ought in reality to have assimilated the physical conditions of life in La Creuse in no inconsiderable measure to those of fertile Normandy. Instead, however, of coming to live and think like a prosperous Norman peasant proprietor, who is least of all things desirous of hanging all the owners of property, the Creuse peasant is coming to think, like some hundred thousand other workmen in Paris, that he would be a good deal better off himself if they were all attached to the cord. Even in Normandy itself, the labourer who has worked in Paris has some subversive ideas. Not long ago one such, seated in a diligence, and apparently well to do, found serious fault with the author for having hands less horny than his own, and intimated that such a state of things was too intolerable to continue.

However, the attractions to Paris are less than they were, through a cessation of public buildings; and it is estimated that about 4,500 fewer emigrants left La Creuse in the year which has just closed. The author himself during a visit to the department last autumn was struck by an appearance of more men in the fields, and an increased breadth of cultivation; and subsequent inquiry satisfies him that such was the case in localities which did not come under his eye. As the German peasant calls his little possession land a Gut, so the

French peasant calls his own a bien; and it is a good, not only to the peasant himself, but to a Government which has done little to deserve it. The land system of France alone saves the Government from an immigration into the capital equal to that which the land system of England produces in London, and much more rapid in its political consequences,