Political Economy [24]
that his farmer should warrant him against bad years; but the farmer who had nothing could warrant nothing, and the master would have given up his good crops without any return. The first farmers were mere labourers; they executed most of the agricultural operations with their own hands; they adjusted their enterprises to the strength of their families; and as the proprietor reposed little confidence in their management, he used to regulate their procedure by numerous obligatory clauses; he limited their leases to a few years, and kept them in a continual state of dependence. During the last century, farmers, particularly in England, have risen to rank and importance. Political writers and legislators have uniformly viewed them with a favourable eye; their leases have ceased to be limited in time to a small number of years, and hence farmers have issued from a more elevated class of society. With large capitals, they have taken farms of a larger size; more extensive knowledge, and a better education have enabled them to teat agriculture as a science: They have applied to it several important discoveries in chemistry and natural history; they have also in some degree united the habits of the merchant with those of the cultivator. The hope of a larger profit has induced them to make larger advances; they have renounced that parsimony which originates in want, and stands in direct opposition to enlightened economy; they have calculated and recorded the result of their operations with greater regularity, and this practice has furnished better opportunities of profiting by their own experience. On the other hand, farmers from this time have ceased to be labourers; and below them has of course been formed a class of men of toil, who, being entrusted with supporting the whole nation by their labour, are the real peasants, the truly essential part of the population. The peasantry, strengthened by the kind of labour most natural to man, are perpetually required for recruiting all the other classes; it is they who must defend the country in a case of need; whom it most concerns us to attach to the soil where they were born; and policy itself would invite every government to render their lot happy, even though humanity did not command it. When the system of small farms has been compared, as is often done, with that of great farms, it has not been sufficiently considered that the latter, by taking the direction of his labour out of the peasant's hands, reduces him to a condition greatly more unhappy than almost any other system of cultivation. In truth, hinds performing all the labours of agriculture, under the command of a rich farmer, are not only more dependent than metayers, but even than serfs, who pay their capitation or their service. The latter, whatever vexations they experience, have at least a hope, a property, and a heritage to leave their children. But the hind has no participation in property, nothing to hope from the fertility of the toil or the propitiousness of the season; he plants not for his children; he entrusts not to the ground the labour of his young years, to reap the fruit of it, with interest, in his old age. He lives each week on the wages of the last. Ever exposed to the want of work by derangements in his master's fortune; ever ready to feel the extremes of want, from sickness, accident, or even the approaches of old age, he runs all the risks of ruin without enjoying any of the chances of fortune. Economy in his situation is scarcely probable; but though he should succeed in collecting a little capital, the suppression of all intermediate ranks hinders him from putting it to use. The distance between his lot and that of an extensive farmer, is too great for being passed over; whereas, in the system of cultivation on the small scale, a labourer may succeed, by his little economy, in acquiring a small farm or a small metairie; from this he may pass to a greater, and from that to every thing. The same causes have suppressed all the intermediate stages in other departments of industry. A gulf lies