the principles of farming, fostered stock breeding. New systems, crops, and implements were introduced; new blood was imported from Denmark to improve the Breton horses; the Dishley sheep were smuggled into the North of France to cross with the merinos. Forest laws were better administered; rivers and watercourses were cleaned, straightened, and embanked. Fiscal imposts were lightened; exemptions from taxation conferred on the best farmers; military duties modified in the interests of the tillers of the soil; aid was distributed to those who had suffered from floods, storms, bad harvests, or the cattle plague. It is curious to notice the demand for free trade. Wages, it was said, could not rise unless corn was rendered dearer by permission to export. The eighteenth century at its close was a free trader, for the same reason which makes the nation at the end of the nineteenth protectionist. Other economists were more visionary or more enlightened. Turgot and Mirabeau dreamed of free trade in corn in peace and war, with friends and enemies. One of Turgot's first measures as a minister was to authorise the free circulation of corn within the limits of the kingdom, a measure which he had advocated in his famous letters written as intendant of the Limousin. In 1787 freedom to export corn out of the country was granted. A committee of agricultural inquiry was appointed on which sat such men as Lavoisier, Dupont de Nemours, Tillet, and the Abbé Lefebre. Its recommendations throw considerable light on the existing state of agriculture. The committee complains of the inability of corporate bodies to grant leases, the incidence of tithes, the vexatious rights of common pasture. It deplores the small quantity of live stock, and points out the means of carrying a larger head afforded by roots and artificial grasses. It proposes to encourage domestic industries by the cultivation of flax and hemp and the establishment of spinning schools. It advocates, as the Abbé Rozier had already done, the creation of experimental farms. It urges the reclamation of sandy wastes by the growth of pines. The credit of this last recommendation was due to Brémontier, who was permitted to carry out his plan on the sterile districts between the Gironde and the Adour. In the reign of Louis XVIII. a statue was erected on the dunes, which he had fertilised, to the memory of the man who conquered for his country upwards of 370,000 acres.

For the most part the Government proved powerless to carry out its projected reforms; an empty treasury, an ex

hausted credit, a corrupt currency, presented insurmountable obstacles. As though in mockery of deferred repentance, these tardy efforts only served to accelerate the Revolution. The peasantry were still exposed to cruel injustice. Inequalities of taxation, local and personal, urban and rural, exemptions bestowed upon the rich, different laws, customs, and usages created a chaos of inextricable confusion which readily lent itself to endless waste, corruption, and wrong. Turgot and Necker failed to break up the corn rings; societies of jobbers still raised and lowered prices; and it was the royal speculations in these operations which gave rise to the legend of the Pacte de Famine,' and sent the Paris mob to seek the boulanger at Versailles. Like all these tardy efforts at reform, the fashionable pursuit of agriculture and the sympathy of philosophers only rendered revolution more imminent. Formerly the peasant was sunk in torpid acquiescence; he accepted his condition as inevitable; his mind was concentrated on the accumulation of sou after sou to gratify his soif du sillon. Now he awoke to find that he was the only productive labourer, the sole representative of the virtues of primitive society; landlords apologised for the feudal dues which they exacted; State taxgatherers admitted the fiscal system to be intolerable. As the peasant paid his dues at the mill, the bakehouse, the winepress, the bridge, the market; as he was dragged from his plough to labour for others, while his own land lay untilled, his smouldering discontent was fanned into a flame. No longer torpid and apathetic, he was alert, open-eyed, straining his ears to catch the faintest whisper of coming change. At last two passionate desires banished every other feeling from his mind-the fierce wish to sweep away those royal, ecclesiastical, and feudal dues which he was told were as unjust as he knew them to be oppressive, and the intense longing to possess the land which he was assured was his by natural right.

When the storm burst, the condition of the peasant was indisputably improved. Territorial privileges were abolished, feudal incidents disappeared; the peasant proprietor was freed from his fetters. Though the Revolution did not create, it greatly enlarged his class. In the fourteenth century peasant proprietors were numerous in France, and, on the whole, they increased continuously. In 1697 they were forced, as we have seen, to sell their estates. But this check was only temporary. Forbonnais points out that in 1750 impoverished landlords sold their lands to their tenants.

Necker states that there was in his time une immensité' of peasant proprietors. Doniol (Hist. des Classes Rurales ') says that before the Revolution a quarter of the soil had passed into their hands. Arthur Young goes further when he declares that in 1787 a third of the land was tilled by peasant owners. The returns on which the land-tax was based in 1790 show that, in many districts, the number of proprietors then amounted to two-thirds of those among whom the land is now divided. It is probable that before the Revolution there were four millions of peasants who farmed their own land. The sale of the lands of the Church, the nobles, and the communes increased their number by nearly a half. It would have added many more, but that the sale of the common lands was suspended because it deprived commoners of their rights. The early extinction of commons in the north is one of the most important causes of its agricultural supremacy.

The National Assembly, the Convention, and Napoleon interested themselves in the promotion of the science of farming. Experimental farms were established at Sceaux and Versailles; Gilbert was employed to import merinos from Spain; a national sheepfold was established at Arles; Napoleon ordered an accurate agricultural survey of the country. But the real energies of the country were absorbed elsewhere, and progress was suspended. Thouin, François de Neufchateau, the Comte de Chanteloup, François Yvart, and many others vainly strove to inculcate the union of science with practice. Their words fell unheeded on the ears of a nation absorbed in the conquest of the world or a death-grapple for existence. Another cause which impeded the growth of scientific agriculture was the ill-success of theorists. As Gabriel Plattes, Jethro Tull, and Arthur Young failed in land management, so the Marquis de Turbilly, the Comte de Chanteloup, and Althen lost fortunes by their experiments. In more peaceful times France has advanced with greater rapidity. Among the crowd of names associated with recent progress we shall mention only three -names hardly less familiar in England than in France— those of Mathieu Dombasle, de Gasparin, and Léonce de Lavergne. The first-named conferred inestimable benefits on the country by the improvements which he effected in agricultural implements. His statue at Nancy represents him in his simple farming dress, holding in his hand the An'nales de Roville;' at his feet is the plough, which symbolises his extraordinary influence on the cultivation of the soil.

Since 1840 thousands of acres have been added to the profitable occupation of the country. Waste lands have been broken up, marshes drained, sands planted, foreshores enclosed; in Brittany alone 750,000 acres have thus been brought into cultivation. New roads have been opened up, new facilities of transport provided, new markets brought to the door of the farmer. Agricultural education, adapted to the scientific and the ignorant, has been organised by the State in a manner which cannot fail to produce important results. In the best cultivated districts of France the soil is well tilled, and the crops are well adapted to the requirements of the locality; the best implements are employed; marl, lime, and manures are freely used; the wasteful system of fallow is abandoned. Farm buildings have improved, and if less machinery is used in the cultivation of the soil, it is because less is required. But, true to her character for variety, the difference between the best and the worst cultivated districts is startling. The cereal produce of the country has more than doubled since 1815; the area of wheat cultivation has extended, to the restriction of rye and maslin; and, though the average yield of wheat per acre scarcely exceeds half that of England, that of oats has nearly doubled, and the French farmer competes successfully with his English rival both in the quantity and in the quality of his barley. In industrial crops the most noticeable feature is the extended cultivation of sugar beetroot, the lever of northern farmers, which has increased fivefold in the past forty years. In meadow management and in dairy work the French are admittedly our rivals; they are our superiors in the produce of their poultry yards. In horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs a marked improvement is manifest both in quantity and in quality. Yet the great deficiency in the rural economy of France still continues to be the comparatively small quantity of its live stock. For this there are several reasons. The peasant proprietor values his cattle for their work, as well as for their milk, meat, and manure. He cannot afford to keep two sets of animals, horses for the plough and cattle for the butcher. But this question of employing cattle in agricultural operations has recently assumed a new aspect. Formerly the peasant killed his cattle either too soon or too late-as young calves, or as worn-out animals from the plough. He still rears calves for the butcher, an operation which we in England regard as wasteful, but which is profitable for small landowners. He still sends his cattle to the market after they have served their time at the plough. But

he no longer sends them when they are aged and worked to skin and bone. He uses them carefully for five or six years, and then sells them to the grazier before they are too exhausted to be fattened. Frenchmen urge that the beef of healthy animals is far better than that of the unnaturally precocious beasts which our farmers send to market at two years old. Again, sheep have declined in numbers, and it is obvious that this diminution is the inevitable result of the extension of a peasant proprietary. There is no room for a flock upon his small holding. The extinction of vaine páture, and parcours, and commons rights has destroyed the only means which the peasant possessed of keeping sheep. Other causes combine to produce the same result. Wool no longer fetches its price, and the peasant will not eat mutton. Since the days of Bakewell English sheep have been bred for meat; French sheep from the time of Louis XVI. have been valued for their wool. If it is said, Why not breed sheep exclusively for meat? the answer would be, Who is to eat it? Parts of Bas-Languedoc, and especially the department of the Aude, are the only districts with which we are acquainted in which the beef of the pot au feu is replaced by mutton. The labourer fed on the farm in Touraine or Anjou expects beef, and turns up his nose at mutton; domestic servants will rarely touch it. Except in the towns it is hardly eaten.

In

But if we trace to this deficiency of live stock the defects of French farming, the ultimate cause of both the one and the other is the slow growth of the population. All the improvements to which we have alluded have been effected without the stimulus of rapidly increasing numbers. the seventeenth century the population of France was about twenty millions. The results of the last census, taken in 1886, have not yet been published; but in 1881 the population amounted to 37,672,000. The Journal of the Statistical Society' for January 1881 states that while the birth-rate exceeds the death-rate in Sweden by 11.5 per thousand, in Denmark by 11.1, in the United Kingdom by 9.2, in France the annual excess is only 2.3. In some districts the population is actually declining. This remarkable contrast between England and France explains the divergence in the agricultural history of the two countries.

6

In many points French agriculture has followed the same lines of developement as English farming. Both countries felt the impulse given to agriculture in the sixteenth century, which in both countries gave birth to a great agricultural