Review of the agricultural statistics of France: with a notice of the works of MM. Rubichon, Mounier, and Passy, respecting its produce, and the condition of its rural population / [Anon].

  • Lovelace, William King-Noel, Earl of, 1805-1893.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Review of the agricultural statistics of France: with a notice of the works of MM. Rubichon, Mounier, and Passy, respecting its produce, and the condition of its rural population / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    stitution endure when the keystone of the arch so curiously balanced, rather then cemented, when the able head that alone has poised with such singular dexterity these incoherent but not inert materials, is at last withdrawn. Since the foregoing pages were first printed, in October last, Mr. M‘Culloch, writing in December, makes, in his recent treatise* some remarkable and almost prophetic observations on the operation of the law of compulsory partition in France. For after observing, that happily the undue subdivision of the land had made but little progress in Great Britain, which, besides supporting itself and the hordes of Irish immigrants that poured in, was able to purchase food for all Ireland also, he “ shudders at the contemplation of what would have been the state of the people in 1846-47 had the land of England been so much subdivided as that of Ireland. Famine in its sternest reality, must, under such circumstances, have been “every where prevalent.” . . “The distress of the present year (1846-47), has been wholly confined to the quarters in which subdivision has been carried to excess: that is, to Ireland, France, parts of Belgium, and Rhenish Prussia. . . . The subdivision of the land under the law of compulsory partition tends to reduce it, whether the occupiers subsist principally on potatoes or corn, to patches fit only to maintain families in the meanest condition in ordinary years.” Further on Mr. McCulloch remarks, that this law “affects the stability of the public institutions of the country more strongly even than it does its agriculture; that the aristo- cratical element, held so necessary in all well constituted governments by the greatest philosophers and statesmen, from Aristotle and Polybius downward, is no longer to be found in French society; and the compulsory division of the soil, while it prevents the growth of an aristocracy, impresses the same mobility on landed possessions that it impressed on the families of their occupiers. Monarchy in France has been stripped of those old associations and powerful bulwarks whence it derives almost all its lustre and support in this and other countries. The throne stands in solitary, though not unen¬ vied dignity, without the shelter of a single eminence, exposed to the full force of the furious blasts that sweep from every point of the surrounding level. There is nothing intermediate, nothing to hinder a hostile majority in the Chamber of De¬ puties from at once subverting the royal branch of the con- * A Treatise on the Succession to Property vacant by Death, by J. R. Madlines, Esq., member of the Institute of France* 1848, p. 193. E