also goes far to remedy defective laws and customs of tenure. It is, moreover, peasant proprietorship alone that prevents the questions of both tenure and landed property from assuming the formidable shape on the Continent which they do already in Ireland, and will do ere long in England. The Report of the Enquête Agricole' suggests additional powers of lease in the case of husbands owning in right of their wives, and of guardians, and again a reduction of the duty on leases, with, moreover, a legal presumption of a lease for twelve years in the absence of a written one. But such measures would give about as much satisfaction, and go as far towards allaying agrarian discontent in France as they would in Ireland, were there not a large diffusion of landed proprietorship, and a facility for both tenants and labourers of passing from that status to the status of proprietor, or of combining both.

It is fortunate for France not only that peasant proprietorship already exists on a great scale, but that the tendency of the economic progress of the country, as already shown, is to substitute more and more cultivation by peasant proprietors for cultivation by tenants; and to give more and more to those who remain tenants or labourers the position and sentiments also of proprietors. The increasing demand for, and rising prices of the produce of la petite culture make it more and more a profitable investment of the peasant's savings and labour; and those very rising prices, and the rising wages, which also follow the development of the resources of the country, put both the small tenant and the labourer in a condition to become buyers in the land market. All improvements in the law of property, and in fiscal legislation respecting it, will tend in the same direction, since the costs attending changes of ownership and exchanges of land fall heavier on small than on large properties. All the highest agronomic authorities in France, instead of objecting to the increasing subdivision of landed property, are urgent for the removal of all legal impediments to its division, as well as those which lay disproportionate cost on its acquisition in

small portions, as in those which retain it in common ownership.

The question of common ownership is one which ought not be entirely ignored in a sketch of the French land system, however brief, although but a very few words can be devoted to it here. Upwards of four million and a half hectares of land in France belong in common. to various bodies, corporations, communes, and villages. Of this area, it is true that a considerable part is in forest, managed by the State, much of which it would be inexpedient to divide and deforest. But the remainder is in great part simply so much land almost lost to the country. In a review of the Reports of the Enquête Agricole,' at the end of last year, M. de Lavergne pronounced that an effective law for the division and sale of the common lands would do more for the increase of the agricultural wealth of France than all other administrative measures taken together; for in addition to the cultivation of land, now almost waste, that would follow, the communes themselves would obtain funds by the sale for the making of country roads, in which the southern half of France, especially, is for the most part lamentably deficient. An act was actually passed in 1860, to facilitate the division of the common lands, but it has produced but little effect. An impediment to the division of the village commons in France, which has come under the writer's observation, arises from a kind of departure of the beneficial from the legal ownership. An entire commune, made up of several villages having each its common land, is the body whose authority is requisite for a division. It may be the interest of the villagers, and their wish, to divide their own common among themselves, but the rest of the commune would often prefer to see the villager driven or induced to bring his own land, with the communal rights attached, into the land market, where they themselves might become buyers. They are not desirous of giving the villagers an additional inducement to stay where they are. If land existed in such ample

abundance that every peasant could have a sufficiency of land of his own to make a comfortable subsistence, or could at least have the advantage and comfort of a cottage and garden, the joint possession by each village of an additional common domain might be regarded as a great benefit; but such is not the situation of matters in Western Europe. Nevertheless the French communal lands, even as they are, give the French peasantry an advantage which the British peasant has been deprived of; and they also provide a fund for the future augmentation of the possessions of the French peasantry, to which there is nothing now corresponding in England.

It is not, however, the object of the present writer to compare the land system of France to that of Great Britain. Those who institute such a comparison will remember that it would be in a great measure imperfect and even delusive if confined to a survey of the present state of agriculture and of the peasantry of France,forward already as is the former, happy as is the latter, in many parts of that country. The history of the two countries, the comparative state of their agriculture and peasantry a hundred years ago, as well as now, must be taken into account. France has had only three quarters of a century of anything like liberty, and less than half a century of tranquillity and industrial life. Nor in any such comparison should the respective effects of the land systems of the two countries on the town as well as on the country be overlooked. Whoever reflects what the French rural population would be, on the one hand, under a land system like that of Ireland, or even England; and what its town population would be, on the other, if instead of being a third it were more than a half of the whole nation, and if instead of having a political counterpoise in the country, it found there only greater political ferment and discontent than its own, must surely pronounce that the land system of France is not only the salvation of that country itself, but one of the principal securities for the tranquillity and economic progress of Europe.

VII.

THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN LEGISLATION OF 1861.

BY JULIUS FAUCHER, OF BERLIN.

Member of the House of Deputies of the Prussian Landtag.

THE bondage of agricultural labour, taken off from the Russian people by the legislation of 1861, was of comparatively recent origin. It is true that, already at the dawn of recorded Russian history, we meet with the existence of slaves of the czar as well as of the nobles of his court, but these slaves were prisoners of war and their offspring, the personal property of their masters, and quite different from the peasantry, which formed the bulk of the Russian people. The noblemen who owned those slaves were themselves no landed proprietors in their own right, nor even vassals owing allegiance for the tenure of land, but servants of the crown, whom the crown had to feed. This, not as a rule, but often, was managed in the form of an allotment to them of crown-land, to be tilled by their slaves, either for a number of years or for life; or, but rarely, with revocable permission to leave the fruit of it to their descendants. Such nobles as did not own slaves were sometimes paid by the czar's abandoning to them the yield of the taxes, due to the czar by the peasantry of one or more villages. But such an arrangement did not legally impair in the slightest degree the personal liberty of these peasants. They remained the free children of the czar, entitled legally to break off their household, and to separate from their village community whenever they liked, and to join another. The yield of the taxes of the place, not that of so many distinct persons, was given in lieu of a salary.