BOOKS.
PEASANT FARMING.* HARDLY any time could have been more opportune than the present for the republication, with emendations and additions, of this thoughtful and suggestive essay. It touches the very core of the agricultural question now beginning to agitate this country, and were one to forget the perennial character of such questions, it would seem as if, when first issued in 1848 this ' plea ' had been very ill-timed. It was a quarter of a century before its day as a
A Fiedler Peasant Pf-bpriefors. By W. T. Thornton. London: Macmillan & Co.
contribution towards the settlement of rural affairs in England, and even now its reasonings and illustrations may be in many cases obsolete or inapplicable long before that settlement really comes. This country is only just beginning to be seriously roused to the fact that it has an agricultural question at all, and some of those most directly interested therein are, in their pain and sur- prise at the discovery, hurrying so fast the wrong way, that it will probably take a long time to bring them round again to sensible thoughts, after most of the rest of the community are ready with an answer.
The primary object of this book is to combat the pernicious error of a large school of English economists with reference to the hurtful character of small farms and small landed properties. Deal- ing first with the tenant holdings, as being the more difficult pro- blem of the two, Mr. Thornton seeks to disprove the wholesale asser- tions made in their condemnation—that a small farmer cannot save anything, that his means of improving the land are too circum- scribed, that he cannot avail himself of the beat mechanical aids nor properly vary his crops, with a host of others all plausible enough, but which are found on calm examination to have surprisingly little foundation in fact. Of course, Mr. Thornton has to go outside Eng- land to find examples of the best results of small farming, but he finds in her dependencies, the Channel Islands, and in Flanders, Switzerland, and France, abundant ground for thinking that, where not rack-rented, or, as formerly in Ireland, kept by bankrupt land- lords as tenants-at-will on miserable scrapsof land, so that the tenant had neither the power nor the chance to improve, the condition of the small farmer is not only far above that of the ordinary landless peasant, if not that of his master, but that the surplus produce of the soil, after feeding a much greater producing population than under the English large-farm system, exceeds what we can obtain. The only wonder is, that this fact really needed any proof, and it is a singular instance of how far men's judgments may be perverted by prejudice and custom. One would think that the evidence daily before a rural economist, in the marvellous extra production of a market garden, or even a peasant's allotment, over an ordinary farm, might suffice to raise doubts whether vast fields tilled by steam, weeded by patent grubbers, and left otherwise to produce in rather a happy-go-lucky fashion, were likely to be the most advanced and profitable of all cultivated lands. On this single point of production, Mr. Thornton conclusively proves the small farmer to have the advantage. He says :—
" In England, the country in which large farms are both more numerous and far better tilled than in any other, the average yield of wheat per acre was, in 1837, only twenty-one bushels, the highest average for any single county being no more than twenty-six bushels. The highest average since claimed for the whole of England is thirty-two bushels, but this is pronounced to be much too high by that best of all authorities, Mr. Caird, who gives twenty-six and a half bushels as the 'average of figures furnished to him by competent judges in all parts of the country ;.' adding, as the result of his own observation, that thirty-two bushels, as an average produce, is to be met with only on farms where both soil and management are superior to the present average of England. In Jersey, however, where the average size of farms is only sixteen acres, the average produce of wheat for the five years ending with 1833 was by official investigation ascertained to be forty bushels. In Guernsey, where farms are still smaller, thirty- two bushels per acre were, according to Inglis, considered about the same time 'a good, but still very common crop,' and the light soil of the Channel Islands is naturally by no means particularly suitable for the growth of wheat. That of Flanders, originally a coarse, siliceous sand, is particularly unsuitable, and accordingly, very little wheat is sown there, but of that little the average yield, at least in the Waes district, is, according to a very minute and careful observer, from thirty-two to thirty-six bushels. Of barley, a more congenial cereal, the average in Flanders is forty-one bushels, and on good ground sixty bushels ; while in England it is probably under thirty-three, and would certainly be overstated at thirty-six bushels."
The extreme yields of the very highest English farming are even
exceeded in Guernsey, and in that respect the evidence of the greater productiveness of small farming over large is overwhelm- ing. The Channel Islands not only feed their own population, but are large exporters of provisions as well.
Small farms being thus found to be more advantageous, it is but an easy step to peasant proprietors, and Mr. Thornton has no trouble in showing that the ordinary English craze on this head is as much without foundation as the other. This system is not perfect, any more than our own, but in the absence of indigence and in general diffusion of independence, of respect for property rights and of social comforts, the contrast afforded by the land-owning peasantry of France and Switzerland to our own is most remarkable. We have recently had a demonstration which all men ccild under- stand of the effects of this system in Franee,—where something like half the soil is thus held,—in the manner in which the peasantry of the country came forward to invest in M. Thiene national loans. Whatever the subdivisions of holdings in that country under a law not very different from our Gavelkind —and subdivision is not so great as we usually suppose— the people manifestly grow rich, for they become extensive fundholders, their industry has saved France once and again, and although at least three times as many of her population live directly on the land as in England, these proprietors afford France an immense advantage over us not only in the diffused thrift which their existence encourages, with its almost boundless power to bear great strains, but in that their unintermittent, if unscientific, labour suffices to feed the country. "Cassandra" has lately been sounding some very gloomy notes over the decadence of England, but, amid not a few that are either misdirected or slightly over- strained, has forgotten what is perhaps for us the one greatest danger of all, the rapid decline of our rural population, the consequent general bad farming, dearness of food, and enormous importations to meet the deficiency of home production. So long as com- mercial prosperity keeps at full tide this is little felt, perhaps, except among the many poor, but it is a true danger, and one result of the present agitation, if we may judge by the conduct and boasts of the Suffolk farmers, tends directly to heighten it. They say that they can get on better with- out their labourers, which means either that they do not care to till the land at all, or that they are determined to be content with the easiest-grown stall-feeding crops. Should such a result become general, the inevitable consequence would be a greater strain upon our industrial resources than ever. The economy that counts it cheaper to bring wheat from Australia than to grow it at home is not a far-seeing one, if home production can be increased. Nothing is more striking in this essay than the remarks of Mr. Thornton, in his first chapter on "Social Effects of Peasant Proprietorship," on the agricultural tenures of the Hebrews and the Romans, and the effects which the divorcing of the people from the soil helped to bring about in Palestine and Italy. From being a prosperous agricultural centre, Rome became a vast "pauper warren." The passage is too long for extract, but it is well worth the study of those who may not be already familiar with the facts. Though, of course, by no means so extreme, the position of England is somewhat analogous. We also are loaded with masses of State-fed paupers, most, if not all of whom might be sustained profitably on the soil from which a multitude of causes have conspired to sever them, thus increasing both the direct burdens by their maintenance, and the indirect by the dearness of food which such subtraction of labour helps to cause.
In dealing with peasant proprietorship in France, Mr. Thornton's first care was of necessity to disabuse the mind of the reader of a host of prejudices, which writers like the late Mr.MacCulloch indus- triously threw up around the subject. Instead of France becoming, as that writer predicted, the greatest pauper warren in Europe, it has, as we have already said, steadily grown in widely diffused wealth, and the anti-revolutionary spirit of the peasantry has grown also, till it is now the one mainstay apparently left to the country. More land has been brought into cultivation ; State and other lands have been bought in small farms by peasants, often at fifteen years' purchase beyond what they would have been sold at in large blocks, a remarkable fact for those who fear that to set land free here would be to give it all to the rich. Amid ignorance and prejudice tillage has improved steadily, and in many parts of the country pauperism is almost unknown. This picture is in some of its lines, at least, old, but there is no reason to suppose that in recent years things have gone backward. The decline in population that the last census showed seems to prove that the Malthusian jealousy of large families, due to a dread of subdivided inheritance, is as strong, if not stronger, than ever, and the evils which so many look for from a system like gavelkind have been only negatively developed. The French gavelkind, as administered by the French people, has, how- ever, its drawbacks, such as the power it gives of equally subdividing not merely the inheritance as a whole, but each particular field of it, in consequence of which, and of the unenclosed condition of the land, a man's inheritance will often be distributed over a con- siderable area, here and there in petty strips, causing waste in all manner of ways, and litigation, with other evils. The result is the same, in fact, as appears to be produced by the communal sub- divisions of the village communities in Russia, only that in France perpetuity of possession gives a stimulus to industry to overcome the difficulties which, to the Russian peasant, constantly changing his fields, by no will or choice of his own, is wholly wanting. So, too, when a peasant proprietor comes to lease his land to a tenant, his grinding avarice or necessity usually makes him the/worst possible landlord ; and where such a system prevails at sal, as it does in some:districts of Flanders, the tenant peasantry are poorly off indeed. In any case, avarice is a remarkable, perhaps inevit- able, moral outcome of the French system.
But on the whole, peasant proprietary in France is a vast source of prosperity, and with some slight changes in the law would be a greater power for good than it is ; and the evidence which Mr. Thornton has brought together over the whole range of his subject, as well as his thoughtful commentary and analysis, makes out a most impressive case for the system,—one that it will be well
for our agricultural economists to lay to heart. Nothing appears more misplaced to an unprejudiced on-looker than the- wild fury with which our farmers greet any sound of a demand by the labourers of this country for the right to farm a few acres. Mr. Thornton quotes—apparently endorsing it, though the state- ment is often a slander, due to dread of unknown consequences, or where partially true, to the prevalence of degrading customs, such as gleaning—the common farmers' objection to labourers' allotments, that they would only use them as a cloak to steal their masters' produce ; but the anger of the farmer at the idea of a labourer getting a few perches of land at four times his rent for a garden is nothing, compared with the wrath with which Mr. Arch's hint that every labourer should have his little holding is received. This is really at the bottom of the extreme resolution which the West Suffolk Farmers Defence Association passed a few weeks ago. This modest demand, perfectly consonant with the present large farming, and, as now put, with the present proprietary system, was denounced by Mr. Rodwell, QC., as "the rankest possible communism ;" and on its criminality was based, as a preliminary to negotiation, the demand for the dismissal of all the delegates, and the suppression of the Chronicle,—a harmless sheet enough, for the most part, not so rabid as Reynolds' as a rule, and, beyond some exceptionally silly letters by the per- manent secretary of the Union—an 'artisan, by the way—and occasional outbursts against the parsons, not really very revo- lutionary. The crime is that it and the delegates talk of the labourer having a right to rent land and to commons. Neither it nor the labourers, however, think of going so far as to demand that things should be here as in France. What Mr. Arch's request now amounts to is that the peasant should have more inducement to stay on the soil where be was born ; that without being above the necessity of working for his bigger neighbour when required, he should not need to contract like a vassal, to fall back upon the parish, or to live like a beggar when that work is not forthcoming ; and if this essay proves anything, it proves that not only is such a demand wise, modest,. and expedient to be granted, but that if the peasant had per- manency of tenure with it, the landlord and all other parties would be absolutely gainers. It is melancholy to see the insane dread that the farmers, of all classes in the world, have of such demands. At one stroke, the granting of them would probably almost relieve them of poor rates, and would remove all anxiety as to the scarcity of labour, although they might, did this system prevail, have to rely on real high farming, and not on a growing manufacturing population, for their profit. And the worst of it is, that their dogged resistance only complicates the question, so that unless the landlords step in and give the labourers justice—be- ginning them, say, as Lord Spencer has done, with an acre apiece —the exasperation of constant refusal is like to make their demands rise. Either that, or they will leave the country,—an alternative just now one of the greatest misfortunes that could befall it.
We have no space left in which to say anything about Mr.. Thornton's plan for relieving Ireland through State reclamation of waste lands. As he rightly enough says, though much of his writing has been rendered obsolete on that head by recent events,. there is still roam for making a peasant proprietary there by that and other plans, and nothing is likely to make Ireland so settled as a recovery of the land for the people in some such way. To our minds, it is not too late to attempt something similar in Engliend, and the agricultural labourers and their friends will do well to keep the common lands yet unenclosed and un- a ropriated before the public, as affording a means of a po *ble beginning of some such experiments as Mr. Thornton sket es out. Only we should not be disposed to allow the State to di so much beforehand for the land, as he proposes. More slesld be left to private effort, lest we had a repetition of the Belgian experience, in which some tenants, turned on to ready prepared holdings at fabulously easy terms, became shortly irre- claimable vagabonds. Whether such plans be tried or not, it is certain that if the labourers do not soon get some footing on the land, their discontent will grow to the hurt of the country ; and although we have no wish to see the English system, as it now exists, altogether overturned, we think no one can peruse this book
without coming to the conclusion that a mixture of small holdings with large, so that every well-doing peasant should have his little farm, would tend, if coupled with tenant-right, to promote good hus- bandry and a solid conservatism the country over. The Tories ought to take the melancholy plaint of Mr. Purves, the Sutherlandshire sheep-farmer, uttered before the Game Laws Committee last year, that he and his fellows are reduced to join the Radicals in the towns to gain their ends, to heart, and not suffer an opportunity so golden for securing the peasant vote to slip away. The English labourer will soon be a powerful backer of the Scotch farmer in the cry for tenant-right and the abolition of all false barriers to the freedom of land transfer, and a league of that kind foolishly resisted may go far.
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