PEASANT PROPERTIES.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—You remark most justly, that great landlords as well as little peasant-owners invest in the soil at a rate that brings them hardly any returns, but the peasant-owner injures the State by the smallness of the produce he extracts from the soil; the large landlord benefits the community by "raising more corn and more good grass out of the land than his many-headed rival."
Probably the number of peasant owners has not much increased during the last twenty years, but the morcellenient into which the minute portions are divided at death, as M. de Foville, the great champion of the system, shows, is greater every year; and interference with this power within the limits of the Code Napoleon (which, after all, only stereotyped the custom of the country) would never be brooked. The legal charges and State taxes on each transfer of these small plots nearly equal the value of land under one thousand francs.
The peasant of the present day has new wants, and cannot live, as of old, on his small plot. As to the "comfortable security" felt by a man living on his own land, the misery in bad years, so common in vineyards and corn-land, must be set against the uncertainty of getting work for a labourer. Jenkins, Voelcher, &c., agree that the scale of living is far higher for these, and comfort greater than that of the peasant- proprietors.
The question now to be solved seems to be, whether the political advantages (even if proved) of this plan of land- tenure can be set against its economic loss to a country. The wastefulness, the inferior production from the land, in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Norway, as shown in the official reports, is now conceded. In France, the little owners are valued as the conservative element of the country. Will the new Irish purchasers be so, or not P and will those other tenant- farmers who are not furnished by the State with money to acquire the fee-simple of the land by an annuity for forty years of a sum little more than half the rent paid ten years ago in many districts—it may possibly be as valuable again in ten years more—be contented by the sight of this vicarious
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