and hope. The advocate of great estates and large farms in Ireland points to a squatter here and there who has cleared a piece of crown land, and become the fee-simple proprietor, yet farms no better and lives perhaps in more squalor than the neighbouring tenantsat-will. La petite culture is a difficult art, which will not grow spontaneously up from the ground as soon as a peasant is planted upon it as owner-the child of immemorial oppression and darkness, and surrounded by such, with the additional hardship in their case of being tenants-at-will. Such a peasant proprietor will probably not thrive; he will do as his fathers did, and as his neighbours do, with only the privilege of doing it more lazily. Improvement-civilisation in everyone of its forms-must be the work of many, and cannot be created by one hand in a desert. The eminent historian Heeren has observed that, but for the Mediterranean, which served as the medium between the inhabitants of three continents, their inhabitants would, beyond question, have continued as uncivilised as those of Central Africa, had the basin of the Mediterranean been a steppe like Mongolia. Flanders was originally such a steppe, but its inhabitants were not cut off from the light which Egypt, Tyre, Athens, Carthage, and Rome combined to shed upon the more favoured parts of modern Europe. Pieces of money of ancient workmanship, bearing the Phoenician palm, have been discovered near Gand, and idols of Isis and other gods found on the banks of Flemish rivers, show that, under names of old renown,' the arts of the ancient world had early wandered there.* The seeds of knowledge planted thus were fostered in the modern world by civic liberty and commerce; and the whole history of Flemish husbandry is, to borrow the language of a Flemish historian, 'bound up with resistance of the mercantile and industrial element to that armed territorial proprietorship which continued the barbarian conquest under the name of seignory.' A crew, who under names of old renown, Their wandering gods disguised in brutish forms.-Paradise Lost. 341 THE FARMS AND PEASANTRY OF BELGIUM, 1870. AMONG the forms in which democracy,--not in the sense only of popular power, but also of a spirit in unison with popular requirements and feelings, and of respect for mankind-displays itself now throughout Europe, none is likely to affect more profoundly both English institutions and English philosophy than the growing interest in the condition and arrangements of other nations of which there is evidence. And it is remarkable in how many of the most prominent questions the experience of the youngest and almost the smallest state in Europe is appealed to. We turn to Belgium, not to Italy, to gauge the relative strength of ecclesiastical power and intellectual liberty; the sharp division of its people into two races or families, one speaking a German, the other a French tongue, marks it out as a field for the study of the race problem in its social and economic aspects; it was the first country in Europe to set the example of placing railways under the immediate control of the State; and in the agrarian controversies thickening around us, it is oftener referred to than any other part of the continent. It is however its Flemish provinces only to which the last-mentioned controversies usually point, when Belgium is cited as an authority on rural economy; its other provinces, though eminent in mining and manufacturing enterprise, having but recently begun to attain distinction in agriculture. The former celebrity of the peasant farms of Flanders is on the other hand never disputed; the main question is, whether its ancient minuteness of both property and cultivation are found compatible with modern progress? To this inquiry a recent writer has returned an answer which has had wide circulation, and it is by no means the truth about Flanders alone which is at stake in the matter: The small proprietors may be found struggling with an ungrateful climate and hungry soil in the haunted valleys of the Ardennes, or the dreary swamps of Limbourg. In other countries, remote alike from commercial activity and the crowded markets of the world, not yet under the tyranny of competition, he still fulfils his humble mission; and by his very industry, rendering each day his little homestead more and more attractive, paves the way to his own extermination in highly civilized countries he is daily becoming rarer. In the fertile plains of Flanders and Brabant he is almost extinct.'* Advancing another step the same writer affirms that in Flanders the peasant proprietor cultivating his own land has disappeared.' The plains of Flanders are assuredly not fertile, unless so far as they owe fertility to the peasant cultivator, and above all to the peasant cultivating his * Letters to the 'Times.' By Mr. W. Mure. own land. But as to the extinction of such cultivators, let us consult the report of M. de Ségur-Dupeyrac to the French Enquête Agricole, respecting East Flanders, the region most perfectly farmed. In East Flanders, of 88,300 cultivators of less than three hectares (lessthan seven acres and a half) 32,201 are proprietors, 37,283 are tenants under lease. Of cultivators of above three hectares, 12,346 are proprietors, against 11,481 tenants.’* On the 545,245 cultivated acres of East Flanders there are thus, according to this report, and exclusive of a great number of other small proprietors, more proprietors cultivating their own land than there were landowners on all the acres of England at the last census. And with respect to the conditions of perfect success on the part of the peasant proprietor's farming, M. de Ségur-Dupeyrac adds: 'Assuredly, these figures tend scarcely to prove that large property and large farms only can make the soil yield its utmost produce, since it is beyond dispute that in beauty of cultivation Flanders is one of the first countries in Europe. At the same time, if small property can reach the pitch of perfection beheld here, it is on the condition of finding itself surrounded by a considerable population, which adds a vast quantity of sewage to the manure the cattle-stalls yield; not to speak of tanneries, manufactures of animal black, refineries, distilleries, and breweries, which likewise by their refuse contribute largely to the amelioration of the soil, and to that uninterrupted succession of crops which here affords to the cultivator a comfortable * 'Enquête Agricole. Documents recueillis à l'étranger,' i. 197. L |