as feudal territory; nor will even an extensive foreign trade, with its changes and chances, supply the place of a brisk and increasing home market afforded by a large, contented, and well-to-do population in both town and country around. The Prussian land system, resembling the French and the Belgian in respect of the simplicity and security by which a transfer is effected—a signature in the presence of a notary, followed by an entry in a local registry, being all that is requisite is superior to either the French or Belgian in point of economy; the duty being but one per cent., and the notary's fee a mere trifle. Some idea of the impediment the English system of conveyancing puts in the way of industrial progress may be gathered from the fact that the capitalist in the Ruhr Basin grumbles at having to pay one per cent. in addition to his purchase-money for an absolutely safe and marketable title; and that, after all, one per cent. is a considerable tax. Suppose a manufacturer pays 10,000l. for an advantageous site for a factory, with ground for his workmen's houses. and his own residence, he is not in a better position to pay 1007. to the Government for having so many other hundreds to pay to the vendor, and being called on immediately for heavy additional disbursements to complete his operations before he can get any return. In France, in a similar case, he would have above 600l. to pay to the State instead of but 100l.; he would, however, then be as safe as in Prussia. In England, supposing title and settlements to permit of a sale in the place desired, after searches, opinions, and conveyance, and the subsequent outlay of perhaps 100,000l. in his business, the purchaser may discover that he has invested only in a ruinous law-suit. The accessibility of landed property to all the other classes of the community, however, may not appear at first sight otherwise than disadvantageous to the capitalist, who finds them formidable competitors in the land market, and by no means easily tempted to part with what land they have got. The author has known land sold in the Ruhr Basin at above 1,200 thalers a morgen, at an auction at which all the bidders but one were farmers and labourers. Land here, as elsewhere in Western Europe, gets more and more into the hands of the diminutive buyer. The wealth of the peasant increases; the mine and the factory themselves add largely to his wealth, and render him a more formidable rival as a land buyer; they both make land better worth buying for cultivation, and enable the cultivator to lay by more for its purchase. The miners, too, and the town workmen accumulate savings; and their first investment is usually a plot of ground for a house. The man borrows the money to build the house, if his savings are short of that mark; and his wife and children cultivate the garden while he works at his trade, until he pays off his debt, or lays by for another investment in land. The easy transfer and general diffusion of land accordingly raises its price against the rich buyer in the Ruhr Basin, as its close monopoly on the contrary does in England; but in the former, the capitalist, as well as the workman and the peasant, has the benefit of perfect security; and he has an additional compensation in the order, sobriety, and diligence of his workmen on the one hand, the home market of a prosperous population on the other. It is not too much to assert that manufactures could not have made the stride they have done in the last fifteen years either in Germany or in France without the aid of their land systems, and the consequently increasing home market for the productions of the power-loom, and the industries to which it gives activity in turn. Now that the war-cloud seems to have dispersed, the capitalist of the Ruhr Basin sees but one other cloud in the horizon-in the attitude which labour is beginning to assume, and the power of organisation over all Germany, of which already it displays no doubtful indications, although the trade-union is a very recent growth. That a fundamental change in the relations between labour and capital throughout Europe is approaching seems beyond doubt; but whatever the issue, it will not on the Continent be the issue at the same time of a conflict between an insignificant number of persons with immense property and an overwhelming number with none; a conflict, it should be observed, which becomes all the more decisive in favour of numbers, when the only weapon employed is Universal Suffrage. 265 A VISIT TO LA CREUSE, 1868.* IT has often been said of late years that Paris no longer is France; that, looking to the show on all sides of mere imperial splendour and power, the influx of strangers from all parts of the world, and the obscurity of the social and intellectual elements of which it once was the focus, it may be the capital of the empire, the metropolis of the world; but the capital of the French nation, the centre of national genius and life, the representative city, it is not. There is, on the other hand, however, a sense in which Paris is now France, in a greater degree than ever before. The town has grown, while the country has shrunk in the composition of France, and the town (especially the chief town) is now made up of elements gathered from the farthest parts of the country. Instead, therefore, of saying that Paris is not France, it is better to say that not only France but Paris itself must now be studied in the remotest departments, to understand the changes which have taken place in both under the empire. A true political picture of the capital, with its new palaces and boulevards, and the enormous increase in its numbers, would exhibit La Creuse in the background, with its desert hills, its mean hamlets, and its vanishing peasantry. The most primitive and isolated of all the departments -the very name of which is not found in Murray or Bradshaw—it has much to tell of the general state of the great kingdom of which it seems so insignificant a part, of that transformation of a rural into an urban population, which is one of the most portentous revolutions of the age, and of the means by which, and the cost at which the modern splendour of the metropolis has been created. Those too who care to see what still remains soundest in France, in the heart of its people and in the character of its institutions, side by side with sad proofs of the change which has passed over both in the last twenty years, will find their account in a visit to La Creuse. They will find themselves, as it were, in a border land between old and new France, recalling with a new meaning the name of La Marche, which it bore as a province.* Without a railway until the other day, ill-provided with roads, and its narrow valleys blocked up as it were in culsde-sac by the peculiar formation of its mountains and hills, it has remained in many respects unchanged since the middle age. The Revolution itself passed it by almost untouched: it is to this day so secluded from the world that all the inhabitants of a village will turn out to gaze at a stranger; yet its male population is the Referring to the ancient name of La Marche and the peaceful character of its peasantry in all past time, so unusual with Borderers, M. de Lavergne says, in the brief sketch of La Creuse contained in his 'Économie rurale de la France: '—'Quoique rappelant les borders d'Écosse, on n'y recueille aucune des traditions belliqueuses qui se rattachent d'ordinaire à ces frontières entre la plaine et la montagne qu'on appelle des marches.' |