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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 which has done little to deserve it.

to a Government

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.

THE PEASANTRY AND FARMS OF BELGIUM, 1867.*

6

BELGIUM, the old cock-pit of Europe,' as it was called, has lately become the chief battle-ground of a controversy in which, though never likely to be fought in blood, and assuming the peaceful guise of an economic discussion, some think they see the beginning of a revolution that will leave behind it few traces of the order of things the quarter of a century of battles that closed at Waterloo was inaugurated to maintain.- Pregnant or not with so great a future, the controversy, in connection with which the rural economy of Belgium is constantly appealed to, concerning the respective effects of large estates and large farms on the one hand, and peasant properties and la petite culture upon the other, is one on many accounts deserving the attention of both the politician and the theoretical economist. As to the latter, the very existence of political economy, as an accepted branch of philosophy, is at stake, if we are to believe a writer justly commanding no little attention in the world of political letters, who affirms that the professors of what claims to be a distinct branch of science are in irreconcilable conflict

* Reprinted from 'Fraser's Magazine,' December 1867.

about its first principles and most general laws, citing among other examples the questions- Are small farms or large farms best? Does the peasant proprietor thrive ?'*

That some fundamental economic doctrines are collaterally involved in the questions thus somewhat ambiguously expressed will not, we imagine, be disputed; but we venture to add, that an economist can no more be expected to decide the questions themselves from the first principles of political economy, or the general laws of production, than a mathematician to say, from the first principles of mechanics and the general laws of motion, whether large or small ships of war are best for naval engagements or whether rifles or cannons will decide the fate of battles in future. To borrow a phrase from Mr. Mill, with which his economic readers are familiar, what the writer referred to calls first principles are in truth last principles. And political economy, like all other branches of science,

* Economists, it is believed, have worked out a system of general truths, which any shrewd man of business can readily apply. We are very proud of our great writers who have created this science. But when we come to study the science, we certainly do not find this agreement among its professors. There are hardly ten generalisations on which the writers are at one, and that not on the details but on the first principles, not on intricate points of practice but on the general laws of production. Who is right about currency? What are the laws of population? Are small farms or large farms best? sant proprietor thrive? Let us suppose these questions body of economists, and we should have them at cross purposes in a moment. Indeed we find ourselves not in a science properly so called at all, but a collection of warm controversies on social questions. What would be the state of medicine, if physiologists were hotly disputing on the circulation of the blood ?'-'The Limits of Political Economy.' By F. Harrison. Fortnightly Review.

Does the peaasked from a

especially those which are of recent birth, is a prógressive investigation, not a completed one. It might take for its motto Bacon's Prudens interrogatio dimidium scientiæ;' and its weakness, where it is weak, is the weakness, not of decrepitude, but of youth, and proves only that it has a wide field and future before it. To answer inquiries such as their critic proposes, economists, in addition to carrying the first pages of their text-books in mind, ought to question the plains of Flanders, and the mountain-sides and valleys of Switzerland and Lombardy; indeed, the rural economy of every country they can visit besides their own. They ought, moreover, to regard such inquiries as most useful, because they add the book of nature to their studies; for every branch of human science, to whatever the stature it has grown, gathers, Antæus-like, fresh vigour from falling back on earth, from which Newton himself learned the movements of the heavens. In immediate connection with the very controversy just mentioned, a late distinguished astronomer not long ago illustrated the importance of terrestrial observation by replying to persons who argue that a system of husbandry which prospers in Flanders might prosper in Ireland: There is no analogy between small farming in Belgium and in Ireland. A visit to Belgium would at once have dispelled the illusion. In Belgium there is a fine climate for the growth of cereals; the soil is usually a sandy loam, producing the finest wheat crops. The country is rich in minerals. Iron is raised in immense quantities, and applied to every useful purpose; there is a great manufacture of artillery and

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