VII. De la liberté de l'industrie agricole [ 130 ] .

CHAP. 17: VII. On the liberty of the agricultural industry.

§ 1. M. de Tracy, in his Treatise on Political Economy, did not devote a particular chapter to agriculture. He combined what he had to say of the labors of this order with what he proposed to say of manufacturing. He made of them one and the same thing. He declared that the agricultural industry was, in his eyes, only a branch of the manufacturing industry which was not distinguished from the others by any specific character, and that he saw in a farm only a veritable factory, where everything operated in the same fashion as in ordinary factories, according to the same principles and for the same end, that is to say, with a view to operating useful transformations.

The spirit that directed the author of the Treatise on the Will here is surely very philosophical. M. de Tracy, by entirely confounding agricultural exploitations with manufacturing enterprises, wished to finish destroying the prejudice accredited by the economists of the eighteenth century, and which seemed to him never to have been very clearly abandoned, that only agriculture is productive, or that this industry is more really productive than the others. He observed that when one put grains of wheat in contact with the air, water, earth, and different fertilizers, and when, by the combination of these diverse elements, one obtained wheat, there was no more creation operated than when one then took this wheat to convert it into flour, or when later one took this flour to convert it into bread.

Nothing is more just than this remark: thus I am quite disposed to recognize, with M. de Tracy, that the agricultural industry is no more creative than another, that it is no more given to it than to another to make something from nothing, and that all its virtue, like that of the manufacturing industry, consists purely and simply in operating transformations.

But, while agreeing that agriculture limits itself, like manufacturing, to operating changes of form, I find first, I confess, so great a difference in the nature of the transformations it operates, in the manner in which it classes its agents to obtain them, and especially in the nature of one of the forces it employs for this object, that it seems impossible to me, even considering agricultural manufactures only in themselves and in their nature, not to make of this species of manufactures a completely separate class.

Agricultural factories operate only transformations; but their products have a character that does not permit them to be confounded with those of any other species of factories: they are endowed with life, in effect, and there exists between them and the products of ordinary factories all the distance there is from raw matter to organized matter. How can one see products of the same nature in natural flowers and in artificial flowers; in the peach that has just been picked from a tree and in that which the confectioner has manufactured; in animals that ruminate, that bleat, that low, that walk, and in the same animals made by the hand of man with clay baked in the fire!

Not only does agriculture create products of a very particular order; but, to create these products, it distributes its agents in a completely different way from the industries of which I have spoken in the preceding chapters. I have said that the agents of carriage were always on the roads and byways; that those of manufacturing were agglomerated in the cities and factories: those of agriculture are neither always wandering like the former, nor united in great masses like the latter: the property of this industry is to disseminate them throughout the extent of the countryside.

[^457]: See, on this subject, the parliamentary inquiry into the state of French industry. [^458]: Le Producteur, vol. I, p. 283.Finally, while agriculture has its particular way of distributing its agents, it also employs forces of a particular nature. I have said that carriage, to make things change their location, and manufacturing, to make them change their external form or intimate texture, employed chemical or mechanical means. Agriculture certainly makes use of these two kinds of forces; but they are not enough for it; it needs one of a third kind: after it has mechanically modified the soil; after, by more or less enlightened chemical processes, it has put its constituent parts in the proportion that experience has shown it to be the most favorable to the work of vegetation; finally after, by a new mechanical labor, it has suitably brought into relation with this thus-prepared soil the seed it wishes to make germinate or the plant it wishes to make grow, a third force intervenes, life, whose nature it does not know, and which finishes its work without it being able to say how.

That this force is indispensable to the farmer is a thing so notorious that there is no need to prove it. That it is of a different nature from that of the other agents he employs is another indubitable thing: is it not evident that the labor which makes a plant germinate or grow differs from that which has chemically or mechanically modified the soil where it is planted? Finally, that this same force is less known to him than those he first made use of is another thing that it is scarcely possible to doubt: when an experienced farmer mechanically applies the iron of his plow to the earth, he knows perfectly the effect he is going to produce; when he mixes with fifty-seven parts of sandy clay thirty-three parts of fine clay, seven and four-tenths parts of siliceous sand or quartz fragments, one part of carbonate of lime in small stones, six-tenths of carbonate of lime in dust, five-tenths of woody debris, and five-tenths of humus and substances soluble in cold water, he knows that he is going to produce one hundred parts of that loam which gardeners regard as the most proper for vegetation, and which a chemist has designated by the name of normal earth [^460]; but when he puts a seed or a plant in contact with this earth, but when he couples animals, but when he grafts onto a tree the wood he has taken from another, he is far from knowing as well the effect that will follow; he does not even know positively if his action will have any effect; he expects one, doubtless; but without being sure that it will take place, and without knowing of what nature it will be.

Thus, far from claiming that the agricultural entrepreneur is more of a producer than the manufacturing entrepreneur, I would be very tempted to say that he is less so, and that the product that comes from his hands is not as completely his work. Doubtless the products of agriculture, like all possible products, are born, multiply, and are perfected only by the act of man; but they are not the work of his hands to the same degree as those of manufacturing. A farmer does not say it is I who have made these fruits, these flowers, this wheat, these trees, these livestock, as a manufacturer is accustomed to saying it is I who have made this tool, this piece of furniture, this alum, these copperas. This is because, in effect, the farmer has not made his products to the same extent that the manufacturer has made his; he has not, like him, constructed them, composed them from scratch; he has contented himself, so to speak, with soliciting an occult power, which has operated the transformation. It is true that he has put this power into play, that he has excited and favored it as best he could; but he is far from having disposed of it as fully as the manufacturer has of his chemical and mechanical agents; he has not been able, like the latter, to guide himself by fixed principles of theory; he has been obliged to stick to the counsels of practice, and to conduct himself only by groping. It is above all this difference in the nature of the forces that the farmer and the manufacturer employ, and in the degree of knowledge with which they make use of them, that puts an immense one in their art.

One of our agronomists, at once among the most commendable as scholars and the most skilled as practitioners, M. de Dombasle, in the critical examination he made of Davy's Agricultural Chemistry, confesses ingenuously that there is here a force whose effects it is not yet given to science to explain, and which essentially modifies the ordinary laws of matter; that to wish to reason as if this force did not exist, and to consider the phenomena of organic life as simple facts of physics or chemistry, would be to expose oneself to falling into the gravest errors; that such an error would resemble that into which medicine had allowed itself to fall when it believed it could explain the phenomena that various agents produce in the human body, without taking account of life, which it did not understand, and by reasoning as it did with respect to inert matter; that facts had come from all sides to accuse a theory that had been formed without them, and that it had been necessary to send science back to study; that facts would likewise accuse any agricultural theory in which one wished to reason about agriculture without taking account of the role that life plays in this art, and by conducting oneself according to the ordinary laws of chemistry or physics; that the knowledge of these laws, separated from the observation of vital phenomena, would here be only a source of errors; that it had caused M. Davy to make a very inexact estimation of the more or less nutritive property of a certain number of vegetable substances; that it had furnished him no good means of recognizing the degree of relative fertility of various terrains; that, with respect to fertilizers, it had likewise taught him little; that, in sum, it had led him into a good number of practical errors, and that it had caused him to write a book not only of little use, but even dangerous.

Thus, although the agricultural industry has no more power than another to make something from nothing, although it is no more creative than another, although its virtue, like that of the manufacturing industry, is limited to operating transformations, it has such a particular way of classifying its agents, it employs forces of such a special nature and creates products so different from man-made products, that it seems impossible, once again, not to consider its establishments apart from ordinary manufactories.

§ 2. If this industry differs from the arts of which I have already spoken by its nature, it differs from them no less by its effects. This difference in its effects stems from the very difference of its nature. Agriculture plays a different role in the social economy than manufacturing, because it creates products of another order there, and because its agents are influenced there differently by the position in which their art places them, and by the nature of the forces they employ.

We have seen, in the preceding chapters, in what manner manufacturing and carriage contribute to the free exercise of all the arts. Agriculture does not intervene in their labors in a less essential manner. It is this industry, even in the restricted sense in which I view it, that furnishes them with most of the materials on which their action is exercised. It is this industry that delivers to commerce that innumerable quantity of vegetable and animal substances, those woods, those cottons, those wools, those hemps, those flaxes, those oils, those raw hides that it conveys from all points of the world into the workshops of the manufacturing industry, and without which that industry would find itself almost reduced to inaction. It is also this industry that provides the other arts and its own agents with the animate motors they use; the horses that the carrier hitches to his wagons or the plowman to his plow; those that the manufacturer employs to set his mechanics in motion, when he cannot employ better motors; all the animals that man uses to operate transports or to effect some other kind of work.

We have seen that, at the same time as manufacturing and carriage furnish means of action to all labors, they deliver to all laborers useful means of acting upon themselves, and of providing for their conservation. Agriculture is no more a stranger than the other arts to this second class of good offices. While it procures for a multitude of industries the materials on which their labor operates, and a part of the motive forces by means of which it is effected, it delivers to those who execute it, and in general to all classes of society, the foodstuffs without which no one could subsist.

That agriculture fulfills a very important role in the social economy; that, without it, the social body could not perform its functions; that most of the arts would be reduced to the powerlessness of acting, and the men who exercise them to the impossibility of living, these are truths that one cannot contest. And, nevertheless, I do not know if there is more reason to say of the agricultural art than of any other that it is the first and most necessary of arts. If men need to be fed, they have scarcely less need to be housed, clothed, instructed, fashioned. If manufacturing cannot do without the materials that agriculture furnishes it, agriculture can no more do without the utensils, the furniture, the tools that manufacturing furnishes it. If carriage needs agriculture to provide it with draft or pack animals, agriculture needs carriage to execute a multitude of transports for it. If there is no class of laborers to whom the agricultural industry does not procure sustenance, there is none from which it does not receive some kind of service; it needs the other industries, just as the others need it; and, as I have already observed, there is no hierarchical order to be established among arts that lend each other mutual support, that cannot do without one another, and that all together have but one and the same object, the conservation and perfection of the human species.

If one cannot say of agriculture that it is the first of arts, still less can one claim that it is the one that exercises the most salutary influence on its agents. There is, if I am not mistaken, much exaggeration in the effects that it has been agreed to attribute to it in this respect. To judge these effects by the banal phrases of its apologists, there would be no art more proper to make men healthy, robust, intelligent, moral, sociable, etc. What is not said in the city of the good health of country people? How many times has it not been remarked that city workers were exposed to lapses in conduct from which those of the country were preserved by their situation? Smith does not doubt that the agricultural art is more favorable to the development of the mind than the manufacturing industry, and that the field worker has a more open and more exercised intelligence than that of the cities and factories. Nor does he doubt that the agents of agriculture have better civil habits than those of manufacturing: “Not only,” he says, “has there never existed a body of trades among country people, but the corporate spirit has not even manifested itself among them [^461].”

I have some difficulty in agreeing to all these good effects that one wishes to attribute to the agricultural industry. Far from considering it as the most proper to hasten our development, I would be tempted to believe on the contrary that it is of all the least favorable to the progress of men, and I would want for proof only the very state of this art, which, of all those that act on things, is incontestably the least advanced.

One wants the agricultural industry to be particularly favorable to the health of men, because it makes its agents work in the open air. That could be true if men lived on the air they breathe, although carriers, sailors, and other industrious people are no less exposed than plowmen to atmospheric influences, and there are few industrious people of whom one can say that their agents waste away and die for lack of exercise or lack of air. But, as what decides above all the health, strength, and longevity of the diverse classes of workers is the degree of well-being they enjoy [^462], I do not know if field workers do not have even less reason to be well than those of the city. It seems to me, at least, that they are even more poorly fed, more poorly clothed, more poorly housed, that the places they inhabit are more poorly kept, and that the whole of their regimen is less healthy and less comfortable still than that of artisans.

I do not wish to deny that the practice of agriculture is proper for exercising the mind, and that it furnishes to those who devote themselves to it the occasion to observe many phenomena; yet from the fact that an artisan's task is sometimes more circumscribed than that of a cultivator, one should not conclude that his intelligence is less open and less developed. The worker in a factory does only one thing; but he sees how that thing is linked to many others, and his mind ordinarily extends to a whole order of facts among which there exists much more connection and coherence than there is in the operations of the farmer.

What is said of the innocence of rustic morals is scarcely good for anything but the theater and novels. When one wants to see things as they are, one is obliged to recognize that the morals of country folk are coarser than those of city dwellers without for that reason being purer. And as for the aversion of the agricultural classes for any spirit of monopoly and usurpation, one has only to place them in circumstances where this spirit can manifest itself to see if they are more exempt from it than the manufacturing classes.

There is in agriculture one thing that must place the greatest obstacle to the progress of its agents: it is the state of isolation in which it forces them to live. Doubtless, in this state, their bad inclinations seem to be less excited; but their good passions must be much less so as well; their faculties of every kind must remain more inert; they must have less emulation, less activity, less inclination to imitation, and also fewer facilities for observing and doing what others do: it is impossible that their industry should not remain behind that of the cities; their morals must also be slower to be polished, their relations to be perfected; they must have less experience of civil life; they have not been able to learn as well to feel and to act collectively: it results, it is true, that they did not give themselves over as early as the manufacturers to the spirit of hoarding and monopoly; but if they have remained longer strangers to this spirit, they are also less corrected of it, and it is easy to recognize that in this respect as in many others, they are behind the classes that have found themselves in situations more favorable to their advancement.

I agree, for example, that at the time when guilds existed, one did not see cultivators raise the pretension of devoting themselves alone to certain kinds of cultivation. Nor did one see them oppose the introduction of a new crop for the profit of the one to which they were devoted: there were no claims for turnips against potatoes, for the olive tree against rapeseed, for natural meadows against artificial prairies, for Berry sheep against merino sheep: what the cultivators lacked, to show themselves as iniquitous as the manufacturers, was to find themselves in a situation where they could as conveniently form the same enterprises; but today, when political bodies exist where they can figure like all the professions, one has only to form a legislative assembly of this class of persons whose revenues consist above all in agricultural commodities, and one will see if this class will show itself more accessible than the others to liberal ideas and sentiments, less an enemy of the liberty of commerce, less ardent to repel foreign competition and to assure itself the monopoly of the national market.

If the agents of agriculture suffer from the isolation in which their art places them, they are far from being happily influenced by the nature of the forces they employ. These forces are such that they escape almost entirely from their direction. We have already remarked how imperfectly life, which is the one they principally use, is known to them, and how, in the use they make of it, they often proceed blindly. Other natural agents, such as heat, cold, dryness, humidity, whose concurrence can be extremely useful or contrary to them, are still less at their disposal. They therefore govern only very incompletely the causes under whose influence their products develop, and they find themselves, by that very fact, much less dominated by ideas of causality than manufacturers, who dispose, so to speak, of all their circumstances, who know much better the nature of the forces they use, and who are infinitely more the masters of regulating their employment and determining their effects.

[^460]: M. de Dombasle, Annales de Roville, 2nd issue, p. 110. [^461]: Wealth of Nations, book I, chap. 10. [^462]: See, on this subject, the Statistical Research on the City of Paris, by M. le comte de Chabrol, Prefect of the Seine, p. 27.Thus, while the manufacturer seeks to ensure the success of his labors only by perfecting his processes and aiming to make an ever more enlightened use of the agents he employs, one will often see the agriculturalist use, in order to succeed, methods entirely unrelated to the art, believe in the influence of the stars, consult them before undertaking certain operations, pay attention to the various phases of the moon, ask the priest to bless his livestock and his fields, have the bells rung for the preservation of the earth's bounty, have masses said to obtain sun or rain, and go in procession to the fields with the cross and the banner. I need not say that all these acts are so many marks of the imperfection of his art and of its tendency to make him seek his successes in means foreign to the art itself. However religious the head of a spinning mill may be, one will not see him invoke heaven and have masses said to obtain that his bobbins spin well and that his fire-pump executes its functions with precision and with force. He knows that the action of his motors and his machines depends on the degree of intelligence with which they have been constructed, and he will apply himself purely and simply to constructing them well. Only those producers who, like the agriculturalist, employ occult forces and need the intervention of agents over whom they have no power, have the idea of resorting to superstitious practices, and seek to ensure their successes by these practices, for lack of being able to guarantee them sufficiently by their labors.

§ 3. If agricultural industry differs from the others by the role it plays in society in general, and by the influence it exercises on its own agents in particular, it differs from them no less by the manner in which the elements of force on which the liberty of labor is founded apply to its labors. No doubt that here as everywhere the power of the workers is formed of a twofold stock of personal faculties and real objects; that the part of their power which is born of their faculties depends on their talent for business, on their skill as artisans, on the progress that their private habits and social morality have made relative to their art; that the part which has its foundation in the real objects at their disposal results from everything that can render these objects more proper for the kind of service they must draw from them, that is to say, from the situation of the agricultural workshop, from its good dimensions, from the manner in which it is set up, from the perfection of the instruments with which it is provided, etc.; that, finally, their liberty is all the more extensive as the sum of all these means has taken on a more considerable increase. But, once again, there is a rather great difference between the manner in which these means can figure here and the role they play in manufacturing industry.

And first, to speak of those of these elements of liberty that consist in personal faculties, and to begin with those of these faculties that I always place in the first rank, there are, it seems, reasons why the talent for business develops here with more difficulty than in ordinary factories. Agricultural speculations, independently of the difficulties they have in common with speculations of all kinds, offer particular ones that are tied to the nature of the instrument that agriculturalists use.

There are lands whose properties relative to agriculture are so limited that one can employ them only to produce certain crops, whatever need one might have to obtain others, and on which there is, so to speak, no room to speculate.

There are none whose fertility is not limited to a certain number of agricultural products, and on which speculation is not obliged to confine itself within more or less restricted bounds.

On all possible lands, nothing is less easy to determine than the most useful use to make of a certain expanse of land.

“It is not enough,” observes M. de Dombasle, “to know a farm in its entirety; one must have studied for a long time and every day each of the fields that compose it, have observed them in all seasons of the year, in all circumstances of dryness and humidity and covered with several species of crops; one must have fixed one's attention on a hundred other circumstances, which can be known only by observations of every moment, to determine the improvements that agriculture can receive there, the species of crops that one can cultivate there with profit, the crop rotations one must adopt, the times at which plowing must be done, the relative depth one must give to each, the instruments one must employ, etc., etc. [^463].”

Finally, independently of the difficulty of recognizing the best use to be made of each type of land, there is a certain destination given to the land that fetters it for a certain number of years, and which, once decided, no longer permits, so to speak, any speculation on it. A Provençal cultivator doubtless speculates at the moment he decides to plant his land with mulberry trees, vines, or olive trees; but it is clear that when he has made this speculation, he no longer has the faculty of making a different one the following year, and that once the vines, mulberry trees, and olive trees are planted, the cultivation finds itself immobilized for a more or less long time. Indeed, enough time will pass before he knows if his speculation is good, before his field is in full yield; and if he then perceives that this type of cultivation is of little profit to him, he will still hesitate a great deal to give a new destination to his land, since he could do so only by sacrificing plantations that were very long in coming and that cost him a great deal.

Thus the difficulty of speculating well, which is very great in all industries, is complicated here still further by particular difficulties, which are tied to the nature of the agricultural art and to that of the principal instrument it uses.

Thus there is perhaps no order of labors where the talent for speculation has made less progress than in agriculture. To tell the truth, there is generally no speculation in this industry. There is a multitude of countries where cultivators have devoted themselves from time immemorial to the same kind of operations, and perpetually grow the same crops without examining in the least whether there might not be useful changes to introduce in the choice of the products they create. What is more, even if they wanted to vary their products and give themselves over to the spirit of speculation, they could not do so with the old system of cultivation to which the soil remains subject, an inflexible system where everything is determined in advance, and where there is room only for the cultivation of a few cereals and the raising of a small number of livestock. The entire skill of the cultivators consists in punctually doing what their predecessors did, and all their energy in trying to obtain, by the accustomed processes, the most possible of a small number of agricultural commodities that are all the more difficult to sell as their production is more expensive and as they are, moreover, less varied.

Thus one cannot doubt that the depressed state into which the products of agriculture have fallen comes above all from the fact that one does not speculate enough in this art, from the fact that one does not seek enough to do business in it, and consequently from the fact that one does not strive as much as one should to vary the products, to bring them into line with the nature and extent of needs, and principally to diminish one's costs of production by perfecting the processes of cultivation.

How can one be surprised, for example, at the state of suffering in which grain producers so frequently find themselves when one thinks of the character of universality that the cultivation of cereals has received, of the effect of abundant years on a commodity already so common, of the difficulty of preserving it, of that of transporting it from places where it abounds to those where it is lacking, of all the causes that conspire to debase its price; and when one considers on the other hand the state of gross imperfection in which the art that creates it has remained, and the obligation one is under to sell it dearly in order not to lose?

How can one be surprised at the distress of our wine-growing regions when one thinks of the unthinking extension we have given to the cultivation of the vine, when one thinks of the abundance of recent years, and when one compares with these two causes of the debasement of the price of wines the costs of a naturally expensive cultivation, or one which at least we have not yet had the art to make economical, and which would consequently require that wines be maintained at a good price? M. Chaptal, in his book on French Industry, published in 1819, does not believe he is mistaken in saying that in France, for thirty years, the cultivation of the vine has increased by a quarter [^464]. Since the time he wrote, this cultivation has continued to extend, and in a perhaps more rapid progression. It is to my knowledge that in several of our southern departments, notably in those of Gard, Hérault, and Aude, forming part of the old Bas-Languedoc, it has invaded considerable spaces; that it has descended from the hillsides into the plains, and has established itself in the best wheat-lands. Add that in the course of the seven or eight years that preceded the one in which I print this (1829), nature seemed to have conspired with the cultivators to multiply and debase the products of the vine, and you will easily understand how it is that the wine-producing countries suffer; especially if you consider that at the time when the producers of wine made the price of their commodity fall by multiplying it without measure, they introduced no improvement into the cultivation of the vine proper to diminishing their costs of production. It does not follow from this, doubtless, that they are wrong to complain of the tax on beverages and of customs legislation; but if the very real and very grave obstacles that these two causes place on the sale of their products have the effect of prolonging their state of distress, one cannot say that they gave birth to it, at least entirely; and it is certain that the ill they experience must be attributed, in large part, to the lack of reflection with which the cultivation of the vine was extended, especially when the costs of this cultivation remained the same.

If, therefore, there is no art where one speculates less than in agriculture, there is also none where one would have more need to speculate; for there is none where one does one's business less well, and where, for that very reason, one would have more need to take thought and strive to try to do it better.

I add that there is none where speculation should be more fruitful, since there is none where it has been less pushed. Precisely because this industry is very behind, it seems that there must be more to do than in the others, and that the agriculturalist who would wish to exercise it according to better methods, especially in the countries where it is least advanced, would have more chances of making profits there than one has in other branches of industry where a very extensive and very active competition has caused the powers of labor to undergo very great developments.

Doubtless one would never succeed in making very considerable profits in it, because the extent of land that a man can farm is necessarily limited. But if it is established that the most skilled agriculturalist cannot suitably farm beyond a few hundred arpents, it is not yet known what values it is possible to accumulate with profit on this extent of land, what power of production it is possible to develop there, and consequently what profits it is possible to make there. While in France, in the countries still subject to triennial crop rotation, a farmer takes on a farm with a few horses, a few carts, a few plows, and a certain quantity of seed, a cultivator in England does not engage in an enterprise of this kind without a capital equal to eight times the rent of the land [^465]. While in France, according to M. de Laborde, the arpent of land yields on average only 15 francs, it yields 37 fr. 50 in England [^466]. M. de Dombasle estimates that in France agriculture could easily, by the adoption of better methods, produce sufficient substances for a population triple that which the soil feeds [^467]. M. Cordier has seen in the department of the Nord lands of the same nature, some of which, still in forests, yielded annually only 10 francs per hectare, while the others, given over to a very perfected cultivation, produced, per year, up to 3,200 francs [^468]. One sees that there is a distance between the powers that it is possible to deploy and the profits that it is possible to make on the same piece of land, and that the spirit of speculation does not fail to have a still rather vast field here.

Already, it would be a very great speculation to try to substitute, wherever the thing were possible, the system of alternate cultivation for the old mode of crop rotation; and this speculation, which could not fail to be fruitful where it was done with prudence and skill, would make many others practicable. Not only, in effect, is the system of alternate cultivation infinitely more productive than triennial crop rotation, but speculation in it is much easier, because the products are much more varied, and it adapts incomparably better to the needs of a numerous population already advanced in the arts.

Thus, although the talent for speculating appears to have more trouble developing in agricultural industry than in the others, and has made infinitely less progress in it, it would be indispensable there as in all, and as in all it could bear upon the nature of the products to be created, on the quantities to be produced, and on the choice of processes to be employed to obtain the products.

Like the talent for speculation, administrative capacity is here of a more difficult acquisition, and it is of no less necessary use there.

Agricultural operations appear to be by their nature of a much less simple and less easy management than manufacturing establishments: the workers being less gathered together, surveillance is less easy; the labors being less uniform, the impulse needs to be more varied; finally, accidents of temperature and changes in the weather come to complicate the management still further by introducing a new order of difficulties in the conduct of the labors, by obliging some to be accelerated, others to be postponed or slowed, and by sometimes causing in the agricultural factory sudden and general perturbations. Thus there is no doubt that the conduct of this sort of manufacture is less easy than that of ordinary factories, where the workers, united in the same building, and able to be much more easily inspected, ordinarily execute only a single sort of labor, and labors whose course is never disturbed by the changes of season and the variations of the atmosphere.

[^463]: Annales agricoles de Roville. [^464]: M. Chaptal, On French Industry, published in 1819, does not believe he is mistaken in saying that in France, for thirty years, the cultivation of the vine has increased by a quarter. [^465]: Quarterly Review, No. 81. [^466]: Esprit d'association, vol. I, p. 195. [^467]: Annales agricoles de Roville, 1st year. [^468]: De l'Agriculture de la Flandre française, p. 18.Nor is there any doubt that good administration is as necessary here, and more so, than in any other kind of enterprise. It seems more necessary precisely because it is more difficult; such establishments are further from running on their own. M. de Dombasle observes that of all the farmer’s dispositions, the one that contributes most decisively to his success is the disposition of character that leads him to firmly maintain order in the management of his establishment. When in ordinary agriculture, he says, where there is so to speak no administration, one looks closely at the details, one sees with astonishment what a loss of time and what imperfection in the labors are the result of the disorder that reigns among the employees.—However small a farm may be, it is impossible for the farmer to execute all the labors with his own hand, and from the moment he is obliged to employ foreign hands, his success and his fortune depend, in large part, on the degree of skill with which he handles these foreign forces.—In any rural exploitation of some size, it is necessary to entrust each branch of the business to a man charged with overseeing all its details. M. de Dombasle has at Roville a head of teams, a head of labor, an irrigator, a shepherd, a dairyman, and a clerk for accounting, all this independent of a certain number of aides and workers paid by the day. Every evening, at a fixed hour, all these heads of service meet with the master, give him an account of the day’s labors, and receive orders for the next. This small staff corresponds to the one it is customary to have in factories, and the role it fulfills is no less essential. M. de Dombasle assures that without the workshop heads and foremen he employs, there is not a month in which he would not lose much more from the poor use of time than he loses by what these employees cost him.—If the head of a vast rural exploitation wanted to set about directing the various branches of labor himself, he could not be at one without at the same time neglecting the others, and he would be subject to making losses on all of them. His first need is to have a second-in-command for each, and the goodness of his administration depends first on the greater or lesser skill with which he divides the details of his task among his subordinates. It depends next on the manner in which he governs them, on the greater or lesser art he puts into interesting them in his business and in taking advantage of their faculties. It depends finally on the degree of attention and judgment he brings to all his expenses, that is to say, to the special costs of each crop, and especially to those general overheads which are not made for any harvest in particular, but which the whole of the exploitation necessitates, and which, in all kinds of enterprises, are those which it is most essential to watch. One finds on these various conditions of a good administration, and on the influence it exercises, the most instructive details in the Annales agricoles de Roville [^469].

If the agricultural entrepreneur cannot do without administrative talents, he can no more do without the kind of skill necessary to keep his accounts well. We know that there is no absolutely good system of cultivation. A certain way of working one’s lands, which is excellent in a given situation, could very well be vicious in different circumstances. A certain costly agricultural instrument that may be economical to use in a large exploitation would be of onerous use in a small farm where it would not have enough work to do to pay the interest on its purchase price. A certain improvement proper to increasing products appreciably without considerably increasing costs, and which it is wise to adopt where production is below demand, would not be good to introduce where one already harvests more products than it is possible to sell. The goodness of a system of cultivation thus depends in large part on the situation in which one finds oneself. The best, for each cultivator, is that which, in his particular position, allows him to draw from his land the most extensive net product. Now, how will a cultivator recognize which one it suits him to adopt, if he does not keep regular accounts? Should he cultivate cereals or raise livestock? Should he raise wool livestock or fattening livestock? Does it suit him to convert his milk into butter, or is it better for him to transform it into cheese? What is the kind of product he should seek to obtain? What is the quantity he should make of it? What are the processes, the motors, the instruments that he should preferably adopt? To these questions and to many others, only exact accounting can furnish satisfactory answers. With the help of well-kept double-entry accounts, a farmer sees at each instant what each branch of his exploitation costs and what it brings in; he can judge which one gives a profit, which one presents a loss, and consequently which one it is important for him to correct or change. He thus tends continually to perfect his system of cultivation, and he works with all the more courage and activity as he sees more clearly into all his operations, and as he can act with more confidence.

Good accounting is therefore of no less help in agriculture than in the other industries. And yet there is perhaps no art where the kind of talent necessary to keep regular accounts is less developed than in this one. M. Simond, author of several esteemed Voyages, admits that he was greatly surprised in England to see farmers go bankrupt like businessmen and have regularly kept books. In France, he says, the balance sheet of a farmer would seem almost as extraordinary and ridiculous as that of an apple-seller or a chimney sweep [^470]. It is certain that in France, and almost everywhere, nothing is yet rarer than to see farmers cultivate, as they say, in a factory-like manner, and keep an exact note of their operations and the results of their operations. It would even appear that this does not always happen in England, and that agricultural entrepreneurs are still far in that country from applying a very exact and very enlightened system of accounting to their exploitations. Now, as agriculturalists are not men of a different species than merchants and manufacturers, there is reason to believe that their inferiority on this point and on several others is due to the nature of their art, which appears less proper than others to develop in its agents the faculties necessary for its exercise.

Thus, two things in this paragraph appear well established: the first is that the talents of speculating, administering, and accounting, and all the faculties of which the genius for business is composed, are as indispensable in the agricultural industry as in the others; and the second, that the nature of this industry has not permitted these means of power to make the same progress in it.

§ 4. The same remark is to be made on the faculties that relate to the art. It is likewise indubitable that these faculties would be just as necessary in it, and that they are less perfected in it.

This is true above all of those of these faculties that relate to the speculative part of agriculture; for, as to its processes and the purely technical part, the knowledge of its agents, without being perhaps as developed and especially as generally developed as that of several other classes of industrious people, is nonetheless passably advanced; and if the nature of the principal agent they employ (life), an agent whose general laws are not yet known, has not permitted their art to be reduced to fixed principles of theory, experience has incontestably enriched it with a very great number of observations proper to guide its march, and which have prodigiously increased its liberty.

How much, for example, has all that has been collected of positive facts and good practical directions on crop rotations, fertilizers, irrigations, and the choice and improvement of species not contributed to facilitating its labors and to rendering its action more powerful and freer?

After several similar harvests, the earth refused to produce. From year to year, it paid with less largesse for the care the laborer gave it. By dint of asking the same products of it, one ended by rendering it completely sterile. It was remarked that by alternating crops, by having improving crops succeed depleting ones, and hoed crops succeed those that receive no tilling, one could not only sustain, but even increase its fertility; one thus succeeded in doubling, in tripling its productive power: is it not evident that, by this artifice, the cultivator has doubled and tripled the power and liberty of his art?

It was a small thing, to maintain the activity of the earth, to give it new plants to nourish each year; it was necessary to restore to it annually by fertilizers the nutritive substance that the harvests annually took from it. It was remarked that by having a part of these harvests consumed by livestock, one could not only recover them with profit in the form of animal products, of milk, butter, wool, fat meat, but also obtain sufficient fertilizers to keep one’s domain in a permanent and even growing state of fecundity. By this the soil has become, in a way, inexhaustible, and the cultivator found he had vanquished one of the greatest obstacles that nature had placed in the exercise of his art: is it not visible that, by this means, he has rendered its exercise infinitely freer?

A running water passed without fruit in the vicinity of a rural exploitation. The owner, taking it at its highest point, examined what was the highest part of his domain to which he could lead it. By skillful irrigations, he made it descend from there into the lower parts of his property. At the same time, he remained absolute master of the point where he had gone to take it; he arranged the means to introduce it and to evacuate it, in a way, on command; he can thus, at every instant, procure for his terrain the desirable degree of humidity: can one doubt that, by this new art, he has not become much freer to fertilize it? It perhaps depends on him to make several harvests where before he made only one; to make a thick grass grow where one saw only an arid sand; it is possible that he has decupled the productive power of his terrain, that he has given it all the fertility it possesses.

How much more has the cultivator not increased his power by the notions that experience has furnished him on the means of multiplying, varying, and perfecting the species of animals and vegetables that it is the object of his art to produce? He can by sowings, by grafts, by crossings of breeds, by a series of intelligent and assiduous cares, obtain new varieties, perfect the old species, and render them all more proper for the diverse services he wishes to draw from them. Will one doubt that such a power renders his industry freer? Is it not evident that, for an equal expense, the cultivator who knows how to make his flocks bear superfine wool, and his trees savory fruits, is freer than he who can draw from his flocks only coarse wool, and from his trees only bitter fruits? Is it not evident that he who, for the same costs, can raise for the butcher oxen of a thousand pounds in weight is freer than he who can raise them only of the weight of eight hundred? It is said that by dint of care and intelligence the English, for a century, have succeeded in doubling the weight of their fattening livestock: is this not to say that, in this respect, they have half again more liberty than they had a hundred years ago? One reads in a curious history that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the gardeners of the Parisian suburbs had to sell to the Parisians only pears of caillot, hartiveau, Saint-Rieul, angoisse, all known for their acridity; wretched red apples, called blanduriau d'Auvergne; a fruit called jorraise, very sour, and which is no longer in use; service-pears, medlars, whitebeams, sloe-berries, ass-scratchers, as the French Academy puts it, and a few fruits nearly as savory [^471]: is it necessary, to see what their successors have acquired of power, to compare these fruits to those that now cover the markets of Paris?

It is therefore not doubtful that we have collected on the agricultural art a mass of notions very proper to direct its exercise and to render it more fruitful. But these notions, how have we acquired them? Was it theoretically? Did we draw them from the knowledge of the general laws that govern the phenomena of animal and vegetative life? No; the agriculturalist has guided himself by the observation of partial, isolated facts, whose causes he did not know, and the agricultural industry has been, more than any other, an art created empirically.

It was empirically that it was discovered in what order plants liked to succeed one another, and what was, in each type of terrain, the most favorable crop rotation. It was empirically that it was learned that water favored the work of vegetation, that a certain water was more fertilizing than another, that the process of irrigation was not equally useful in all terrains, at all times, at all hours of the day. It was empirically that the English obtained so many good types of animals and vegetables; that they succeeded in creating such varied and precious species of potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and turnips; that they collected up to two hundred varieties of wheat; that they managed to make excellent horses for the saddle, and others for draft; cows for milk, and others for giving large-sized calves; tallow sheep, others for wool, others with small bones and fleshy limbs; pigs that are low, but long and wide, grazing on meadow grass like sheep, and fattening almost without expense; in a word, livestock not only very appropriate for their diverse destinations, but very easy to raise, and able often to give, for the same costs, profits three times more considerable [^472].

Bakewell and Culley operated their prodigies without knowing the general laws that life observes in the production of animals; and the physiologists who aided them with their lights would themselves have very probably been greatly embarrassed to reduce to general principles the particular observations on which their counsels were founded. Both succeeded in obtaining so many useful improvements in the diverse races of domestic animals on which they acted only by a series of experiments, made doubtless according to indications furnished by nature, according to observed facts, but according to facts whose generative cause they did not know, and whose law they would have had great difficulty in writing.

One can say as much of most of the improvements that have been operated in the diverse branches of the agricultural art: they have been obtained by the experiments of practice far more than by the speculations of theory.

According to M. de Dombasle, chemical analysis furnishes the means of determining with certainty neither the nutritive value of the diverse vegetable substances that are employed for the nourishment of livestock, nor that of the diverse fertilizers that serve for the nourishment of plants, nor in general the properties of the soil relative to agriculture and the means of increasing its fertility.

From having discovered by analysis, he says, that such a substance contains so much starch, mucilage, sugar, gluten, or albumin, one cannot conclude that it is nutritive to such or such a degree; from the fact that such a substance remains insoluble when we subject it, in a capsule, to the action of water or any other chemical agent, it does not follow that it will conduct itself in the same manner when it is subjected to the action of the digestive organs.

Several facts, continues M. de Dombasle, may lead one to presume that certain fertilizers form a much more nutritive food for plants than others; but the extent of this difference is entirely unknown to us; we lack facts to determine, even vaguely, the nutritive property of almost all these compounds.

Chemical analysis, continues the same agronomist, by determining the nature and proportions of the constituent parts of a soil, teaches little about its properties relative to agriculture. Physics offers slightly surer means of judging its fertility. But an experienced cultivator, by an attentive observation on the terrain, judges it much more surely still, and the use of this means will teach him more about the goodness of a farm in half a day than six months of experiments made in the laboratory will teach the chemist and the physicist [^473].

[^469]: Annales agricoles de Roville. [^470]: This is the passage from M. Simond's Voyage en Angleterre, vol. I, p. 260. [^471]: Histoire de la vie privée des Français, by M. Le Grand d'Aussy, vol. I, p. 115. [^472]: See, on this subject, the Voyage agronomique en Angleterre, by M. de Dombasle, and the Annales de Roville, 1st year, p. 195. [^473]: Annales agricoles de Roville, 1st year, p. 165 and following.It appears that, in general, the services agriculture has received from chemistry and physics are far from living up to what it had expected from them. These sciences, which have been so eminently useful to the arts that create inorganic products, have been much less so to the one that proposes to obtain vegetable and animal products. Those that deal with the structure and functions of living bodies have not succeeded any better than those that study the laws of inert matter in linking the processes of the agricultural art to fixed principles of theory. All have provided it some help, no doubt: M. de Dombasle cites a certain number of cases where analytical research on the nature of the soil can be useful to the cultivator by offering him the means of recognizing if there are in his terrain certain elements whose presence would require him to subject it to a particular treatment. I see elsewhere that the discovery of the sexual system of plants by Linnaeus, which has made it possible to carry out cross-breeding between them by causing the pollen that detaches from the male organs of one species to fall into the female organs of another, has thereby offered the agriculturalist a means of obtaining important and numerous varieties. There are surely many other cases where science has furnished useful inspirations to art. But the number of these inspirations is small in comparison to those it has drawn from its own experiments; and it must even be added that it is only by starting from the positive facts of the art that learned men have been able to make good applications of science, and that here as everywhere the good method is to go from practice to theory, and not from theory to practice.

§ 5. If, pursuing the course of our observations, we now wish to examine how moral habits act here, we will have occasion to remark that this order of means, like the preceding ones, is as essential here as in the other industries, and at the same time that it develops with more difficulty. One will observe, however, that the difficulty the agriculturalist's morals experience in forming stems from a cause different from those that were pointed out in the last two paragraphs as contrary to his progress in what pertains to art and business. What retards the progress of his morals is neither the nature of the instrument he uses, nor that of the special forces he employs; it is the isolation in which his art forces him to live, a circumstance we have already presented above (§ 2) as placing an obstacle to his progress of every kind. For the rest, it may be true that the situation of cultivators retards the perfection of their morals without it being any less certain that the perfection of their morals is indispensable to the successes of the art they exercise. Thus, for example, it is not doubtful that the distance at which they are from one another is little suited to stimulating their activity. There is no one who has not remarked how much better the workers of the city fill their time than those of the country; how much livelier their movements are, how much more accelerated their labors; how much more work they do in a given time. This difference, in the degree of diligence and celerity that these two classes of laborers display, is all the more striking as one passes from a more backward and more deserted countryside into a more populous and more advanced city. However, from the fact that the field worker, who is not excited like the city worker by the presence of a numerous population animated by labor, ordinarily does his work with a bit of slowness and nonchalance, it surely does not follow that the ardor and activity of the city would not be very good to introduce into the labors of the country.

It is likewise indubitable that the situation in which agriculture places its agents is not made to awaken and maintain emulation among them. It scatters them, in effect, while manufacturing gathers and concentrates its own, and by bringing them closer, by putting them in contact, causes them to rival one another and to mutually excite one another to give their industry all the development, all the perfection of which it is susceptible. But if agriculture is little favorable to emulation, there is no way to doubt that emulation would be very favorable to agriculture, and that one of the best means of advancing this industry would be to put its agents in communication, and to inspire in them the desire to imitate one another, to surpass one another in all the good they do. We know to what point the agricultural fairs and meetings in use in several counties of England have favored the propagation of good methods of cultivation there. The same custom, recently introduced into one of our departments by M. de Dombasle, is beginning to produce the most happy effects there [^474].

Persons who have lived alternately in the country and the city, among country folk and city dwellers, have been able to remark that in the houses of the city provisions of every kind are ordinarily better managed, furniture and clothing better kept, expenses better regulated, and that in general more economy and order reign there. And yet, can one say that the inhabitant of the country has less need of order and economy than that of the city? Does it not seem, on the contrary, that the less the art the cultivator exercises is suited to enriching him, the more he would need to profit from all his resources?

The country is not ordinarily the abode of elegance and taste. The same cause that prevents the development of activity and several other moral qualities there also prevents one from feeling with a certain vivacity that desire to be well, to please, to attract attention, which is in the city the source of so many perfections, and consequently prevents one from giving much care, not only to one's person, but to one's habitation, to one's farm; from rivaling to see who will have the best-kept, cleanest, best-adorned fields. And yet who does not feel how much this sentiment would be made to hasten the progress of agriculture? Who knows for how much it has entered into the progress it has already made, and for how much it will enter into that which remains for it to make? Is it not in good part to this desire to distinguish oneself that one must attribute the industry, the method, the good order, the studied cleanliness, which are so perceptible, it is said, in English farms [^475]? the magnificent plantations of trees with which the Flemish farmers surround their fields and envelop their houses? the flowers, so sought-after and so varied, that they cultivate near their dwellings [^476]?

I have not noted a vice or a virtue proper to extending or restricting the powers of labor in general that does not manifest the same effects in agriculture.

How much, for example, has it not been harmed by the contempt that certain classes have so long affected for the useful professions? If this perversion of morals has placed great obstacles to the progress of all the arts, it has opposed particular ones to the agricultural industry. It is through this that this industry was for so long delivered over to misery, ignorance, and apathy. This vice was the cause that the holders of the soil, instead of working it themselves, discharged the care of cultivating it first onto slaves, then onto sharecroppers, then onto tenant farmers, and thus the land found itself placed almost everywhere between proprietors who were not cultivators and cultivators who were not proprietors. Thereby, agriculture was, so to speak, reduced to the impossibility of making progress. By whom, in effect, could it have been advanced? By the proprietors? They did not concern themselves with it. By the cultivators? Besides the fact that they lacked the necessary resources and knowledge, they had little or no interest in perfecting it: as slaves, their evident interest was to work as little as possible; as sharecroppers, their interest, while trying to draw the most possible from the soil, was not to make advances on it from their savings which they would lose entirely if they were dismissed, and whose profit, in any case, would go by half to the proprietor; as tenant farmers, their interest was to make only those advances from which they could promise themselves to recoup with benefit before the expiration of the lease. It is true that by extending the duration of leases, by rendering the condition of tenant farmers less precarious, it was possible to interest them in making greater improvements; but what system of tenancy could excite them to make for the land all the improvements it was susceptible of receiving; what system of tenancy could inspire in them, for a property that was sooner or later to be taken from them, the interest and affection of the proprietor?

To get an idea of the harm that contempt for labor has done to agriculture by separating the interest of exploitation from that of property, one has only to consider a little where the manufacturing and commercial industries would be if, following the example of the possessors of land, the proprietors of factories and commercial houses had wanted to discharge onto tenant farmers, onto sharecroppers, onto slaves, the care of making their establishments prosper. There were, it is true, in the nature of the agricultural industry reasons why it did not make the same progress as manufacturing and carriage; but if this industry has remained so far behind the other two, it is in large part by the effect of the vice I am pointing out; it is because the land, less fortunate than factories and commercial houses, has generally had for masters men devoted first to war, later to intrigue, and in all times to idleness and dissipation, which men, while taking every imaginable precaution so that it would never leave their hands, have always disdained to work it, and have abandoned its cultivation to people who were poor, ignorant, without interest in doing well, and whose industry and activity, to top it all off, they have discouraged in a thousand ways.

After contempt for labor, few vices have been more fatal to the agricultural art than the love of pomp. This vice has various ways of harming the cultivation of the soil: it opposes the division of properties that are too large; it subtracts immense terrains from agriculture; it takes from it no less considerable capital; it is the cause at once that much land remains fallow, and that much other land is poorly cultivated. An ostentatious proprietor does not aim to have the extent of terrain that he is capable of making productive; he aims to have the most land possible; for him it is not a question of cultivation, it is a question of ostentation, of domination. He would rather reign only over wastelands than have a domain that is too circumscribed. This man's vice not only opposes the division of land as the interest of the art would demand, his mania pushes him to steal much land from the labor of the plow. He sacrifices to representation the best part and sometimes the most considerable part of his property; he converts his fields into avenues, into courtyards of honor, into parks and luxury gardens; he leaves immense spaces as forests for the sole pleasure of the hunt. His passion does not permit him to make a more judicious use of his money than of his land; in his expenses, he aims above all at effect; he decorates his chateau at great cost, and lets his farm buildings fall into ruin; he has statues in his gardens, and lacks instruments of cultivation on his farms; he has the paths of his park sanded, and his tenant farmers communicate with the public road only by ravines. Under the influence of the passion that dominates him, the land takes on an aspect of sadness and sterility. For a few parts that are planted, built, cultivated with some care, all the rest is in a state of nudity, dilapidation, and misery.

If the pomp of the great proprietors causes such notable damages to agriculture, the carelessness of the small cultivators sometimes does it no less harm; while the former sacrifice everything to ostentation, the latter do almost nothing for well-being. The Marquis d'Argenson remarked particularly two things in our countryside, nearly a century ago: the extreme filthiness of private individuals, and the even greater negligence with which things for public use were maintained.

“On the matter of cleanliness,” he said, “you have yet to see a single house that the inhabitant has taken it into his head to keep neat, where he puts in order and makes each thing proper, as is practiced in Holland. In our lands subject to the taille, I have not seen a single one; everything has a tattered air. It seems that order and neatness are a very abstract thing.... As for the indifference to the public good, in which one is oneself so very interested, that is an even greater subject of surprise: it goes so far as to hate the general good.”

What especially astonished M. d'Argenson was the state in which the inhabitants of each village consented to leave their roads.

“How,” he asked himself, “does a townsman not take it into his head to restore a paving stone before his door, instead of a pond where he drowns? How does he not clear the street of thorns and refuse? How do five or six rustics not say to themselves: ‘Let us properly fix, in our spare hours, this square, this passage, this little bridge [^477]?’”

These judicious reflections, written in 1735, would still in 1829 have the merit of being timely. You have still yet to see in our rural communes, especially in some departments of the center of France, houses that the inhabitants take it into their heads to keep neat. The best and most prominent are still indignantly kept; they lack the most indispensable furniture; no convenience, no taste, no cleanliness; gardens barely enclosed, barely laid out; no plantings, no shade; courtyards where thistles, brambles, and nettles grow among stones, wood shavings, straw, manure, refuse, and tree trunks that are scattered there in confusion, and among which are irregularly traced narrow paths that have been worn by use. Outside, and to communicate from house to house, not streets, but mires; for local roads, ravines, precipices, true break-necks. This, in a good part of what we call la belle France, is the general aspect of the rural communes and the houses they contain.

In the time of the Marquis d'Argenson, the inhabitants of the countryside, to excuse themselves for being so dirty, would say that cleanliness would give them an air of ease that would soon cause the taille to be doubled; and that honest minister had the good faith to agree that they could well be right. He consequently found them excusable. That was perhaps to show oneself very indulgent. Do men not seem unpardonable who, for fear of taxes, dare not pull themselves out of filth and put themselves in a situation less unworthy of humanity? Men worthy of the name know how to free themselves from misery, and to defend their ease against exorbitant taxes; such men work without respite to get organized, to clean themselves up; they purify their dwellings; they drive from them venomous reptiles, troublesome insects, and they also learn to defend themselves against that other, much more formidable species of vermin that feeds on rapine and extortion.

But it is not only, it must be admitted, the fear of unjust taxes that prevents the inhabitant of the countryside, in certain countries, from properly keeping his fields, his garden, his dwelling, as well as the things he enjoys in common with his neighbors; it is also neglect, laziness, the lack of taste, the absence of moral dignity. Born in filth, he has grown accustomed to this state, or, if it repels him, it repels him less than the efforts he would have to make to get out of it. He does not feel, or feels only very weakly, that need to improve his condition, of which I have made the apology elsewhere, and which I have called the love of well-being. (See chap. xiv, p. 96 and following.)This passion, so favorable to the progress of all industries, is of a nature to exercise the most salutary influence on that of the agriculturalist. The proprietor who is animated by it does not discharge onto strangers the care of cultivating his heritage: he works it with his own hands. He does not aim to expand beyond measure: he wants to have only the extent of terrain that he feels capable of exploiting well. He is not an enemy of what can make his domain agreeable, for his first desire is to be well: but, for the very reason that he aspires to make it agreeable, he first wants it to be productive, and, in his efforts to embellish it, he always tends to improve it. At the same time that he decorates his buildings, he strives to appropriate them to the object of his enterprise; what contributes to the ornament of his gardens almost always tends to make them more productive; he consents to lawns being sown there, but on the condition that they serve as pastures; he does not exclude ornamental trees, but he admits fruit trees by preference; the paths he traces for strolling serve at the same time for the convenience of cultivation; the plantations of forest trees he executes around his fields allow him to clear his forests. Like the pompous proprietor, he seeks, if you will, only his own satisfaction, but he calculates his enjoyments better; and, while the latter ruins himself for false pleasures, he knows, while making his happiness, how to work still for his fortune. Not only does the passion he feels impart a better direction to the use of his forces and resources, but it stimulates his activity, it awakens his intelligence, it animates his courage; it inspires in him ideas of order, economy, and cleanliness: this sentiment is, in a way, sufficient for him to feel all those that the exercise of his art demands.

One sees how private habits tend to increase the powers of the agricultural industry. If this industry appears little suited to hastening the progress of these habits, it is indubitable that these habits are very suited to accelerating the development of this industry. It may well be that all are not equally necessary to it; that it does not demand precisely the same ones as some other order of labors; that it does not require as much frugality as the literary professions, the same kind of courage as the trade of a sailor, a miner, a roofer, etc. But if it does not draw equally on all private virtues, or if it does not employ them all in the same manner, there is probably not one from which it cannot draw some advantage, and which is not of a nature to become for it an element of power.

§ 6. One can say likewise that there is no good social habit that does not have the effect of extending its liberty. It is true that it has not been more favorable to the development of this new order of means than to that of all the others; that, although the isolation of its agents may have long preserved them from the contagion of certain injustices, it is far from having contributed to advancing their education as citizens; that the sole effect of this isolation has been to leave them without public spirit, without common sympathies; that when they have been called upon to express collective wishes, they have been far from showing themselves more advanced than the other classes of workers; that they appear on the contrary to have always been, politically as in other respects, behind most of the professions that enter into the social economy... But, if it is certain that relational morals, like private habits, like technical knowledge, like the spirit of speculation and the talent for business, are more retarded among agriculturalists than in the other classes of industrious people, it is equally indubitable that, for this order of workers as for all, it is one of the most indispensable means of liberty.

I have said that for no industry is there any true liberty possible except where men, in their mutual relations, know how to abstain from any fraudulent or violent enterprise against the person, fortune, or faculties of one another. This proposition is true for the agricultural art as for all arts. What need have I to say, for example, that no agriculture would be possible where the appropriation of lands was not respected, where each wanted to seize the field that suited him? Is it not evident that the liberty to cultivate the soil would be materially destroyed by the continual violences to which one would be exposed, that it would be morally destroyed by the discouragement that would result from these violences, and by the state of barbarism into which agriculture would fall? There is no doubt that one would lose at once the will and the capacity to fertilize a field that one did not have the certainty of keeping. The infallible means of rendering the earth uncultivated and of making the world a solitude would be to put into effect, if the thing were humanly possible, the famous maxim of Rousseau, that the fruits are for all, and that the land is for no one. From the act of violently despoiling one another of one's properties to that of furtively committing some damage or some larceny on one another's fields, the distance is great, no doubt, and one feels that the liberty of cultivation would not be equally attacked by acts of such different gravity. However, in whatever way one reciprocally attacks one's rural properties, it is clear that one takes away more or less from one another the faculty of working them, and that the powerlessness to act to which one is reduced is all the greater, as the harm one does is more grave, and as more discouragement results for each.

Thus the liberty of agriculture does not exist, or exists only in a very imperfect manner, where the harvests are not in full safety in the fields; where neighboring proprietors seek to encroach upon one another; where one makes no scruple of crossing or breaking down fences, and of cutting a path for oneself across fields to shorten one's route; where the land is subject to rights of passage and of vacant pasture, and where one is not master of one's property for a portion of the year [^478]; where certain proprietors, to give themselves the pleasure of the hunt, claim to have the privilege of raising harmful animals in their woods, and not even leaving to the cultivators whose harvests are devastated by these animals the faculty of destroying them. We know that our old laws on hunting forbade commoners from killing the black and red beasts that entered their heritages. They could well chase them with stones; but they had to carefully avoid doing them any harm: to risk killing them would have been to commit a grave offense [^479]. Things, in our day, have made some progress in this respect. It appears that now the peasants living in the vicinity of the forests can, without incurring punishment, shoot at the wolves that come to slaughter their flocks, and even at the wild boars that devastate their harvests. However, what we have gained on this point is perhaps not as considerable as one might suppose: it was seen, in 1817, seven rural communes of the arrondissement of Senlis vainly demand the faculty of organizing hunts to repel the invasion of a multitude of wild boars housed in the forests of Alatte and Chantilly, and which came to commit horrible damage in their fields [^480]. One feels that the liberty of agriculture is reconciled rather poorly with this remnant of respect for the black and red beasts, and in general with all the particular excesses I have just enumerated.

It accommodates itself no better to the pretension raised by the generality of cultivators to exclude foreign agriculturalists from the national market, and to sell their products at a monopoly price. Besides the fact that such a pretension exposes them to a multitude of vexatious reprisals, and allows them to sell their products for more only by obliging them to pay more for all the objects of their consumption, it has the effect of slowing, in all respects, the development of their activity and their intelligence. It is not without regret that we see M. de Dombasle lend the support of his high reason and his honorable character to an order of demands that seems at once so unjust and so unenlightened [^481]. According to him, our agriculture, backward as it is, has no means of sustaining itself and advancing except by warding off foreign competition and selling us its products above their true value. But the question, even apart from any idea of justice, is precisely whether this practice is favorable to its progress. I confess that this question seems to me little explored by M. de Dombasle. This skilled agronomist confines himself, so to speak, to positing as fact what is in question, namely that, in the state in which agricultural production finds itself among us, prohibitions are an indispensable encouragement. But do agriculturalists procure for themselves a true encouragement through prohibitions? Do they encourage themselves by exposing themselves to reprisals? Do they encourage themselves by causing those of their products that they could sell advantageously on foreign markets to be kept out? Do they encourage themselves by authorizing all national producers to form pretensions similar to their own and to sell them their products for more than they are worth? Do they encourage themselves by putting themselves in the position of paying much more for iron, tools, labor, and everything they need than they would outside a system whose effect is to make everything more expensive? Do they encourage themselves by delivering themselves from the only competition that could pull them from their lethargic sleep? By warding off this useful spur, do they do anything other than encourage themselves to laziness, to routine, to persistence in false directions and in vicious processes? Is it not shameful that our agriculture cannot sustain the competition of countries placed, with regard to agricultural production, M. de Dombasle admits it [^482], in situations analogous to our own, often less favorable, and in several of which agriculture finds itself burdened with much more onerous taxes than among us? Does one owe encouragement to livestock breeders who, despite the support of very high duties, can struggle against these countries only with disadvantage? Or rather, is the encouragement one owes them not that of a regime of liberty that does a salutary violence to their apathy, and that finally forces them to think of perfecting their industry? How can a man who has sought to introduce so many useful perfections into our agriculture seem to reject as vexatious that of a system of liberty and justice? It is doubtless important to bring to the adoption of this system the same reserve as to that of any other order of innovations; but if one must advance in it only with prudence, one must nevertheless advance, and of all the acquisitions that cultivators, as well as the other classes of industrious people, need to make, one of the most urgent is without a doubt that of an order of ideas and civil habits which, by making them desire the progressive establishment of a general system of competition, tends to place them in a situation where they are more stimulated to do well, and where they have more of the means to do so.

If, therefore, the liberty of cultivators is closely linked to the goodness of their private morals, it depends no less immediately on the perfection of their social habits, and in general on the progress that respect for the rights and property of others has made in them and among all men. The greater and more universal this respect is, the more rural properties are sheltered from attack; the more each, in striving to make the best possible use of his field, is disposed to let others do the same, and to admit the general competition of other cultivators, and the more agricultural liberty there is.

Let us add, however, that for this liberty to be complete, it is not enough to feel as an individual the respect of which I speak here, and that one must also have become accustomed to feeling it as a public. There can be in effect, and there ordinarily is, a rather great difference between the sentiments that the inhabitants of a country manifest in this regard, when they are isolated, and when they act in common. In isolation, cultivators would not even conceive the thought of compelling their neighbors to buy their commodities rather than commodities of foreign origin, whereas, united in a legislative assembly, they will probably make no bones about excluding foreign wools, grains, and livestock from domestic commerce. Individually, we permit ourselves no violent enterprise on the land of another; whereas, socially and in a collective name, we still arrogate to ourselves a very extensive authority over private possessions. Society long attributed to itself the right to pronounce confiscations. It has sometimes happened that it despoiled entire classes of their heritages. With all the more reason, it does not fear to commit lesser attacks. In France, for example, and in our own time, it finds it quite simple to seize the mines, quarries, salt works, and saltpeter works that a private individual may possess in his ground; it awards the exploitation of them to whomever it pleases; it refuses it to the proprietor if it sees fit; it forbids the proprietor of a field from opening without its participation the mine he has on his own ground, and, without the proprietor's participation, it has his terrain searched, it has it turned upside down to look for a mine there [^483]. If I possess a peaty terrain, I cannot extract the peat from it without its authorization [^484]. If it wants to open or continue a canal, a road; rather than make the slightest detour, it cuts my enclosure in two; it fells my trees, my buildings, my fences. It is society that presides over the exploitation of my woods, the education of my flocks, the choice of my harvests. It forbids me to clear my forest without its permission, to fell trees of high forest there without notifying its forestry agents six months in advance. In the interval, it chooses those of these trees that it pleases to reserve for its navy; and if, a year after having had them cut, squared, and carried to a certain place, it no longer suits it to keep them, it permits me to dispose of them, and leaves me the care of getting rid of them [^485]. Where I would have wanted to sow alfalfa, it ordered me not long ago to grow wheat [^486]. Where I had a mind to grow wheat, it prescribed to me a little later to sow beets [^487]. It is still severely forbidden for me to plant my field with tobacco without it having authorized me to do so. If I want to have my rams castrated [^488] or to geld my horse [^489], I must call its commissioners. I cannot destine my stallion for stud if I have not had it approved by them, nor employ it for more than a year in this kind of service without submitting it to a new inspection [^490]. This is how society acts with regard to my rural property. The respect we have for this property as individuals, we cavalierly dispense with as a political body. Unlike other societies, and for example English society, which takes no such licenses with regard to the property of private individuals, which lets each proprietor cultivate his field, raise his flocks, plant, clear, cut his high forests, exploit or sell his mines without exercising the slightest control over his operations, we regard ourselves, when we act collectively, as more the masters of the properties of private individuals than the proprietors themselves.

It is not that there are not among us men, even in rather great number, who blame these enterprises of the public or its delegates; but there are probably still more who approve them, or at least who see them with a sort of indifference; for if only the majority of the politically active part of society had a somewhat keen sentiment of what they offer that is unjust, ridiculous, pernicious, if it condemned them as they deserve to be, one does not quite understand how they could take place. If, therefore, it is possible to carry them out, it is because apparently they are in measure with what there is among us of political capacity, of intelligence of property and its advantages, of common disposition to respect it.

Now, with political dispositions that render possible such a series of excesses against rural possessions, one understands that agriculture would have great difficulty in acting with liberty. What does it matter, in effect, that private individuals respect my property in isolation, if collectively they despoil me of it or suffer me to be despoiled of it by the trustees of the collective authority? What good does it do me to have nothing to fear from individuals if I have everything to fear from society or its proxies? Do the functionaries, the constituted bodies, the active citizens who attack or allow an attack on the property of my field trouble its cultivation any less because they call themselves electors, deputies, ministers, forestry agents, inspectors of stud farms? No, doubtless; the harm they do me is the same; it is even more grave and more discouraging, for it is more difficult for me to escape it: there is a possibility of defending oneself against isolated malefactors; but what defense can be made against excesses that are born of the moral state of the masses? It is clear that one can expect the cessation of violences whose true cause is in their state only from their progress.Not only does society, by the rights it arrogates to itself or allows its delegates to take over my rural property, materially prevent me from making it productive, but it takes from me the desire to improve it. The direct effect of its encroachments is to make me lose emulation and courage. Beware, it seems to say to me, of raising fine stallions; for you will have to deal with my inspectors of stud farms. If your field conceals mineral riches, avoid letting it be suspected; for you will attract my mining engineers to your land. Respect your wastelands, do not plant trees in your heaths, or at least cut your woods young, and before they are twenty years old; for after twenty years you will no longer be their master. You would perhaps like to grow fine high forests in your woods, around your fields, along your avenues: do not yield to this desire, hasten to fell your trees before they are four feet around; for as soon as they have acquired this dimension you will no longer be free to dispose of them. Woe to you, if you let your plantations grow too beautiful: they will be noticed, they will be noted as fit to be subjected to marking for felling, and once subject to this kind of conscription, you will no longer be able to cut a tree there except at the good pleasure of my forestry agents.

Such is, in truth, the way society encourages me. And so the effect corresponds to its recommendations. It is enough, to be convinced of this, to consider the state in which we find the exploitation of mines, the raising of livestock, the cultivation of trees, especially if one judges these things by comparison with the state they are in in other countries where there are no mining engineers, no inspectors of stud farms, no conservators of forests. Such is the influence of our forestry regime that, at a time when an eighth of the soil of France is still covered with woods of every category, it is found that in a great number of arrondissements there is a lack of firewood, and that everywhere there will soon be a lack of timber. The old oaks are disappearing, observes an enlightened agronomist; the woods are being depopulated, the proprietors are felling their beautiful trees, transforming their forests into coppices, and reducing by a third, by half, the duration of the management plans: all by the influence of our forestry administration. There is in the very title that this administration bears something savage that frightens cultivation and prevents its progress. Conservation of forests: conservation of dens for wolves and thieves, obstacles to the extension of clearing and to the cultivation of fine trees, this is what these words mean, if not in intention at least in effect. It is, for example, quite certain that the effect of the powers that society remits to its conservators of forests is to prevent plantations from being executed where wood is lacking, and to have the beautiful trees destroyed wherever there are any. In this regard, I do not ask to be believed on my word. I urge the reader to read what one of our most distinguished engineers published, a few years ago, under the veil of anonymity, on the Forestry Code then in project. He will see in this writing, where high enlightenment is united with a great knowledge of facts, the real influence that our forestry administration exercises on the cultivation of woods [^491] .

I know very well, for the rest, that it would not be enough to suppress the multiplied hindrances that society places or allows to be placed on the exercise of the agricultural art for that art to be exercised with full success. From the fact that we would have the political liberty to exploit our rural property, it does not follow that we would possess all the faculties that make a skilled cultivator. Political capacity does not necessarily imply all other kinds of capacity. Nor does this order of faculties make it possible to do without the others. But if that one does not dispense with the others, none, to be sure, dispenses with that one; and it is certain that a nation does not possess a true capacity for agriculture, and that it is only very incompletely free to exercise it, as long as it has not acquired the social habits that the practice of this art demands.

§ 7. We have just seen to what point the diverse orders of means composed of personal faculties are essential in agriculture, and at the same time how little advanced these means still are in it, how, by its nature, this industry has been little favorable to the progress of the classes that exercise it. We will now have to make observations of the same kind on the order of powers into which enter only real objects. We will see likewise how much the state of these objects is of a nature to influence the power of the agricultural art, and at the same time how difficult it is to appropriate these objects to their destination, how much more trouble one has here than elsewhere in giving them the qualities from which their strength results and which permit one to draw great benefit from them.

Thus, for example, it is not doubtful, considering the agricultural workshop in its entirety, that the liberty of labor, in agriculture as in the other industries, does not depend greatly on the situation of the workshop. It is wrongly, if I am not mistaken, that M. Say says of entrepreneurs of cultivation that they do not have, like entrepreneurs of factories, the power to choose the seat of their industry [^492] . Doubtless a cultivator cannot move his farm; he can no more do so than a manufacturer can move his manufactory; but just as a manufacturer, before building his factory, can choose the place where he will construct it, so an agriculturalist, before founding his agricultural exploitation, is very much the master of choosing his terrain and of seeking the most favorable location. One is inclined to seek good places for agricultural establishments as for all kinds of establishments, and he whose farm is well-situated can for that reason alone draw a much more considerable benefit from it. It goes without saying that a rural exploitation has more value at the gates of a city, on the bank of a canal, of a road, than placed in the middle of the lands, far from all communication and all outlets [^493] .

Not only is there a possibility in agriculture of choosing the seat of one's industry, but there are cases where this choice is of absolute necessity, and there are many crops for which one must necessarily have regard for the climate, the exposure, the nature of the terrain, etc. The reasons that can make one prefer one location to another are no less numerous here than elsewhere. However, as an agricultural factory covers infinitely more space than an ordinary manufactory, it is clear that the number of good places must be smaller for rural exploitations than for manufacturing enterprises, and that, for that very reason, it must be more difficult to place a farm well than to situate a factory well.

It must be added that in agriculture this difficulty of choosing the place of one's establishment is complicated by that of determining the extent that it is suitable to give to the workshop. One asks here a question that has not been raised, to my knowledge, in any other order of labors: it is whether one must work large or small, and which is the good agriculture, small-scale or large-scale. Is there an advantage in exercising the agricultural industry on a vast stage? Is it exercised with more profit on a very circumscribed terrain? For the interest of the art, should the land be divided into exploitations of ten perches? Is it better that it be divided into exploitations of five hundred or a thousand arpents? This is what is disputed, and what it is hardly possible to decide in an absolute manner. In this regard, as in many others, things follow the laws of their nature and arrange themselves according to circumstances, without letting themselves be chained by vain debates. Thus, whatever one decides, the lands will naturally be more divided in the vicinity of large cities than in the middle of the countryside and far from habitations; they will be divided differently for the cultivation of garden plants than for that of cereals; they will become more fragmented in countries where the soil is very fertile than in those where the soil is very poor. Next, one will see them constantly be distributed among the population in the same way that capital and agricultural knowledge are distributed there; that is to say, they will go, like all things proper for producing, to seek the persons most capable of drawing benefit from them, and by that very fact the most disposed to pay a good price for them. If, as in England, there exists a class of cultivators who are at once very rich and very skilled, the small entrepreneurs of cultivation will be in no state to struggle against them, and the lands will tend naturally to be united into large farmsteads. If, as elsewhere, the most general attribute of landowners is ignorance and a scarcity of money; if it happens that the small cultivators have to apply to cultivation, all proportion guarded, more assets and know-how than the elevated classes; if it is found that the lands produce more in the hands of the common people than in those of the great proprietors, one will see them infallibly leave in pieces the hands of the great proprietors to go and settle in those of the common people. And it will be quite in vain that the great property owners take iniquitous measures to prevent them from escaping; for they will be the very first to go against the spirit of their own laws and to sell their fields in parcels. It is thus that among us, for a very long time, they themselves give the example of the fragmentation of which they complain. It is not the Civil Code that is the cause of the land being divided. It would not be the re-establishment of the right of primogeniture that would prevent it from being divided. The lands become fragmented, in France, because they generally have more value in the hands of small cultivators than in those of large tenant farmers and great proprietors; just as they remain agglomerated in England for the opposite reason. Their universal tendency, I repeat, is to be distributed like the means proper to make them productive. In the competition between buyers of all classes, they go, as M. de Dombasle judiciously observes, to those who can draw the greatest products from them, because it is they who can put the most considerable price on them [^494] . One thus sees that it is not possible to determine in an absolute manner how lands should be divided: it is the circumstances that decide it.

However, these very circumstances can serve as a rule; and one can say first, in general terms, that the soil is all the better distributed and the action of agriculture all the more free, as the size of the rural exploitations is more in relation with the nature of the terrain, with the species of cultivation, and especially with the faculties of each cultivator. So that the lands will be equally well divided in the countries of small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale agriculture, if in each of these countries they are found to be distributed like the resources proper to make them productive. What matters, above all, in effect, is that they be in the hands most capable of drawing benefit from them, and that they be divided like the means that their cultivation demands [^495] .

After that, it would perhaps be fortunate if these means were distributed in such a way as to provoke one distribution of the soil rather than another. It seems in effect that not all ways of distributing it must be equally favorable to its good exploitation. There are reasons to believe that with proportional equality of intelligence, activity, and pecuniary means, three cultivators, of whom one will exploit a hundred perches, another a hundred arpents, and the other a thousand arpents, of a terrain of the same nature, will not draw from this terrain the same proportional revenue. A very extensive workshop, a very circumscribed workshop, a workshop formed of very small and very scattered pieces of land, appear to be equally unfavorable to the free and fruitful exercise of agriculture.

If the workshop is too small, one cannot apply perfected methods of cultivation to it; it becomes impossible to adopt a good system of crop rotation; there is no way to raise flocks and to have the necessary fertilizers; there are almost no machines that one can employ; everything must be done by hand, that is to say, more poorly, more expensively, and with more trouble; not being able to habitually occupy several workers, one is obliged to do everything oneself; one loses one's time changing occupation ten times a day; one acquires dexterity for none; one makes for several things the same expense as in larger exploitations: one needs a shepherd for one cow as for thirty; one must go to the market for one sack of wheat as for twenty, etc., etc.

If the workshop is too extensive, one experiences other disadvantages: one is subject to losing much time in comings and goings; distant transports entail considerable expenses; surveillance is more costly and is not as exact; certain pieces can be so distant from the main center of the exploitation that their cultivation becomes impossible by dint of being expensive, and then it happens that one pays for lands that one is obliged to leave fallow or in pasture the same rent and the same taxes as for the best-cultivated portions of one's domain; having much more to do without having more time, one is subject to leaving a part of one's work imperfect, or else one must, in moments of pressure when labor is in great demand, have many supplementary workers, and one is then crushed by costs; etc.

Finally, if the workshop is composed of very fragmented and very scattered pieces, one can experience at once the inconveniences of workshops that are too circumscribed and workshops that are too extensive. It is possible that certain pieces may be so small that one cannot get the plow into them, and others so scattered that there is more loss than profit in working them. Of all the modes of distribution, this one is without a doubt the most unfavorable.

A country where the rural exploitations, composed of well-united pieces, are neither too large nor too small, therefore appears to have, for good cultivation, a great advantage over those where the soil is otherwise distributed. One must, to be able to cultivate according to good methods, have a workshop of a certain size; but as the workshop extends, all the inconveniences of large exploitations become more sensible, and there is certainly a point where the economies that it is possible to obtain by a better mode of cultivation are absorbed by the losses and the proportionally more considerable costs that the enlargement of the exploitation entails. It is this point that one must know how to recognize and not to exceed. The best dimension for a rural exploitation is that which allows one to adopt, in the most restricted frame, the best system of cultivation, and to draw a certain benefit from the smallest possible extent of terrain.

If it appears difficult in the agricultural industry to assign good dimensions to the workshop, it is no easier to give it a good internal organization. A manufactory properly so-called offers in this regard many fewer difficulties than a rural exploitation. In a rural exploitation, in effect, one proposes an object and one employs means much more complicated than in an ordinary manufactory. It is often a question in a factory only of the making of a single kind of product, whereas one aims in a farm to obtain extremely diverse products. Next, the labors of a manufactory can be subjected to a precise, regular, almost invariable mode of action; whereas those of a farm, though far from being arbitrary, are susceptible, as I have already said, of being modified by a multitude of circumstances, and have, by their nature, something indeterminate, which does not permit them to be subjected to so constant a course. It does not therefore appear possible to set up a workshop of cultivation on a plan as simple and as fixed as a cotton spinning mill, a cloth factory, or any other such workshop of fabrication. However, one can surely in a rural exploitation place and arrange the buildings, divide the terrain, establish means of communication from all parts of the farm with the main center, and from the main center with the outside, in a manner more or less appropriate to the object of the exploitation; and it is not doubtful that the work is executed there with all the more ease and liberty, as all this is ordered there with more discernment and foresight [^496] .

[^491]: Observations on the Project of the Forestry Code, by M. B***, engineer of bridges and roads. Paris, 1826. [^492]: Complete Course on Political Economy, vol. I, p. 287. [^493]: M. de Dombasle, Annales de Roville, 1st year, p. 11. [^494]: Annales de Roville, 1st year, p. 11. [^495]: M. de Dombasle, Annales de Roville, 1st year, p. 11. [^496]: M. de Dombasle, Annales de Roville, 1st year, p. 11.A new remark to be made is that it is infinitely less easy in agriculture than in the other industries to replace the labor of man with that of machines. This again stems from the nature of the agricultural art, which obliges the one who exercises it to transport himself successively with his tools over all the parts of a more or less vast and uneven terrain. The result is that unlike manufacturing, for example, which acts without moving and can have its labors executed by a waterfall, a current of air, or an elastic fluid, agriculture cannot adapt any of these forces to its agricultural implements, and draws almost no benefit from them [^497]. Thus there is no comparison between the power of the motors and machines that each one uses. The greatest motive force ordinarily employed by agriculture is a team of a few horses, whereas it frequently happens that manufacturing employs in its workshops steam engines with the force of one hundred and one hundred and fifty horsepower. The difference between the effects produced is no less great than between the means employed. The action of the horses that the plowman hitches to his plow is perceptible, at a given moment, only on a single point of his farm, whereas that of the motors that the manufacturer adapts to his looms is felt at the same time and in a continuous manner throughout the extent of his factory. If there is this inequality between the machines that produce the movement, there is no less of one between those that receive it and produce the useful effect. What agricultural instrument is there whose effects can be compared to those of the crane, the rolling mill, the spinning machine, and a hundred others in use in the manufacturing industry? It is evident that for force, extent, rapidity, precision, and delicacy, the effect of agricultural implements does not approach that of most of the tools that serve in manufacturing.

And yet, despite this inferiority of the instruments that agriculture uses, it is not doubtful that, in this art as in all, labor becomes all the more free as one can employ more perfected and more powerful tools to do it. It is incontestably easier to plow the earth with the plow than with the spade, to break it up with the harrow than with the rake, to sow it with the wheelbarrow seeder than with the dibble, and with Ducket's or Fellenberg's seeder than with the wheelbarrow seeder. Everything that saves the plowman time, trouble, and expense evidently increases his liberty. M. Cordier observes that with one of the weakest horses, hitched to the plow called the Brabant, one plows in Flanders, to a depth of six to eight inches, and in hard and clayey terrain, half a hectare or forty-seven thousand four hundred and fifteen square feet per day; whereas in most of our other provinces, one plows per day with a plow hitched to four oxen or two horses only fifteen thousand square feet, and only to a depth of four to six inches [^498]. It was established in a public competition, according to the same author, that one plow placed in the same circumstances as others, that is to say, plowing the same terrain and pulled by the same number of horses, could, in the same space of time, execute six times more work [^499]. M. de Dombasle estimates that Meikle's machine for threshing grain, which is in use in England on all farms of some size, increases the gross product by about a tenth, and the net product of grain cultivation by at least a third [^500]. One sees by these few examples that the power of the cultivator can be greatly increased by the intervention of machines, even though it is far from being so to the same degree as that of the manufacturer.

Agriculture has another disadvantage: labor is not divided as well in its workshops as in those of the manufacturing industry, and, consequently, it cannot enjoy, to the same degree as that industry, the facilities that result from a good division of labor for the good and rapid execution of the work. The production of agricultural commodities certainly requires a certain sequence of operations like that of manufactured products; but these operations cannot be executed in a continuous and simultaneous manner like the labors of factories. One does not see in a workshop of cultivation a certain number of men constantly and simultaneously occupied, some in sowing wheat, others in weeding it, others in harvesting it, others in threshing, winnowing, and sifting it, as one sees in a pin factory, for example, a certain number of workers constantly and simultaneously occupied, some in drawing the brass wire, others in cutting it, others in sharpening the points or fashioning the heads: no; in a grain manufactory it rather often happens that almost all the workers are occupied at the same time with a single operation, and moreover a rather long time always elapses before one can pass from one operation to another, as from plowing to sowing or from sowing to harvesting. It is therefore certain that labor does not lend itself here to as good a division as in factories. However, the agricultural industry surely does not fail to admit a rather great division into its labors. The manager, the bookkeeper, the head of teams, the head of labor, the shepherd, the plowmen, all fulfill particular functions in a rural exploitation; and, if the exploitation is at all considerable, it is not doubtful that everything there runs all the better as these functions are more distinct and better separated. Then if each of the great operations of cultivation, such as plowing, sowing, harvesting, and the threshing of grain, cannot be executed in a continuous manner by as many separate agents, each of them, at the moment it is executed, can be shared among a certain number of workers who contribute to it in diverse ways, and it is certain that they are all accomplished all the more freely as these divisions are more skillfully effected.

Thus, it is quite certain, as I announced at the beginning of this paragraph, that the stock of real objects finds in agriculture the same obstacle to its perfection as the stock of personal faculties, and at the same time that the perfection of this order of means contributes to the liberty of the workers, as in the other industries. It is advantageous here as everywhere to have a workshop favorably situated, organized on a good plan, provided with powerful machines, and where labor is well divided, even though here all that is much less easy to obtain than in the manufacturing industry. One sees to what point agricultural factories differ from ordinary manufactories, and how much this class of establishments needed to be considered apart. Agriculture is distinguished from manufacturing properly so-called by the isolation in which it places the men who exercise it, by the nature of the forces it employs, by the grandeur of the theater on which it works, by the diversity of the products it creates there, by the difficulty of recognizing those it is most advantageous to produce, by the difficulty of finding good locations for such an extensive kind of establishment and of organizing these establishments in a suitable manner, by the impossibility of introducing blind motors and of using very powerful instruments there, by that of subjecting labor to divisions as good as in factories, and by the continual disruption that the inclemency of the seasons and the variations of the atmosphere bring to its labors... All this means, as we have seen, that this art advances only slowly and with difficulty, and that the powers of labor have made infinitely less progress in it than in the two industries I have previously treated; which does not prevent, as we have also seen, the liberty of the workers from becoming greater as each of these powers develops; and that the talent for business, the knowledge relative to the art, the perfection of private and social morals, the good location of the workshops, and everything that can render them more proper for their destination, are so many elements of power. We have observed how each of these elements acts in particular; let us conclude by adding a few words on the effect that results from their concourse and their ensemble.

§ 8. The more progress the capital applied to agriculture has made; the more the classes that exercise this industry have increased the sum of the talents, knowledge, and habits it requires; the more they have added to the mass of their material means; the more values they have spread over the lands in plantations, buildings, enclosures, and works of drainage or irrigation; the richer they are in livestock, agricultural implements, seeds, foodstuffs to feed the workers, and money to pay them and to meet the necessary expenses: the more, evidently, they possess of strength and liberty of action. Like all other industrious people, the cultivator finds in the progressive increase of his powers the means to increase them still more: he works on a larger scale; he sets up his workshop better; he administers it with more order and method; he introduces more powerful tools; he brings his agricultural factory, as much as the nature of things permits, closer to true manufacturing establishments; he makes more trials and experiments; he sacrifices more to the progress of his art: one has often seen, in England, twenty-five guineas given to have a single ewe covered by a fine ram; it has happened that English farmers have paid up to a thousand guineas (24,000 francs) for the rental of a ram for a single breeding season [^501].

The effects that the art produces are in proportion to the means it employs. One does not know to what point it is possible to increase the products of the soil by perfecting the means applied to cultivation. Arthur Young, crossing Champagne-Pouilleuse, judged, from the knowledge he had of the powers of the agricultural art, that it would be easy to make certain arpents of land that were rented for only 20 sous yield 72 francs per year. I have already spoken, according to M. Cordier, of certain lands situated in the department of the Nord, whose products, per hectare, are, relative to those of other lands of the same nature, as 3,200 is to 10 [^502]. This author observes that cultivation has made enough progress in Flanders for the average rental price of lands there to be more than four times as high as in the rest of France [^503]. According to the calculations of certain English writers, England, with an agricultural workshop smaller than ours by more than half, would obtain products nearly a quarter more considerable [^504]. England and Scotland, according to M. Cordier, have infinitely more livestock than France, although these two countries have a surface area of only two-fifths of ours [^505]. M. Dupin estimates that in England and Scotland, the totality of animal forces is equal to eleven times the totality of human forces, whereas in France it is equal to only four times the totality of the same forces. I see in M. Cordier [^506] that the arrondissement of Lille, where cultivation is done with horses, has five times more oxen or cows than the other departments of the kingdom, in most of which one has only oxen for plowing the land. All these evaluations are perhaps not rigorously exact, but they are exact enough to make one understand to what point the products of agriculture can increase as its means extend and accumulate.

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Notes

[^460]: See le Bon Jardinier, 1829 ed., p. 10. [^461]: Wealth of Nations, book 1, ch. 10, second section. [^462]: See above, ch. 16, p. 227, the note. [^463]: Annales agricoles de Roville, vol. I, p. 73. [^464]: Vol. I, p. 174. [^465]: See the Annales agricoles de Roville, vol. I, pp. 111 and 112. [^466]: Esprit d'association, p. 271, in a note, first ed. [^467]: "It is quite certain," says this skilled agronomist, "that if the entire surface of French soil were cultivated like the arrondissement of Lille, the Waasland, the Campine, or the county of Norfolk, one hundred million men would live there much more easily than the population that inhabits it today." Annales agricoles de Roville, vol. I, p. 26. [^468]: Agriculture de la Flandre française, pp. 405 and 335. [^469]: See notably vol. I, p. 127 et seq., and vol. II, pp. 180 to 204. [^470]: Voyage en Angleterre, vol. II, p. 64, second edition. [^472]: Cordier, Agric. de la Flandre franç., Prelim. Disc. and p. 467. Brit. Rev., vol. XIV, p. 171. [^473]: See the Examen critique des Élémens de chimie agricole de Davy, 8vo; Paris, 1820. [^474]: See the Ann. agric. de Roville, vol. III, p. 234 et seq. "The English," observes the author, "consider agricultural festivals as having partly remedied the isolation of farmers, and as having powerfully contributed to the progress of the art through the emulation they have excited among those who practice it." Vol. I, p. 144. [^475]: See Simond, Voyage en Angleterre, second ed., vol. I, p. 19, et passim. [^476]: The passionate taste of Flemish farmers for fine agriculture, observes M. Cordier, leads them to cultivate flowers around their homes, and to attempt, in this type of cultivation as in all others, sorts of feats. They have succeeded, through much perseverance and care, in infinitely multiplying, by means of seedlings, the varieties of carnations, primroses, auriculas, and roses; and each year they obtain new and highly sought-after species." Agric. de la Flandre française, p. 450 et seq. [^477]: Extracts from unpublished memoirs. [^478]: This right of common grazing rights, which makes any good system of crop rotation impossible, exists, according to M. de Dombasle, in nine-tenths of France. (See the Calendrier du bon cultivateur, pp. 387 and 308.) [^479]: See the Ordinance of Orléans, art. 137. - Hunting, according to an old and honest jurist (Ferrière, Dict. de droit, under the word chasse), is a pleasure very noble and very useful to health, but which should be permitted only to kings, princes, and a few other persons who, alone, no doubt, have the right to be in good health. The ordinance of 1669, drafted according to these principles, forbade hunting to the commoner, of whatever state and quality he might be, under penalty of a hundred-franc fine for the first offense, two hundred for the second, and the pillory and banishment for the third. [^480]: A petition signed by the one hundred and forty-six principal inhabitants of these communes, presented to the Chamber of Peers, was dismissed by the order of the day. The same was true of another petition of the same kind addressed, the same year, to the Chamber of Deputies. [^481]: See the Annales agric. de Roville, vol. V, pp. 92 to 176. [^482]: Ibid., p. 124. [^483]: See the law of April 26, 1810, on mines, ore deposits, quarries, etc. -- In our old law, the king was the owner of all mines; for this reason, says Laurière, that mines are a fortune of gold, and that fortunes of gold are a benefit that is an essential part of sovereignty. [^484]: Law of April 26 already cited. [^485]: See the law of April 29, 1803, a decree of April 11, 1811, and the Forestry Code voted in 1826 by the chambers. [^486]: It is known that, during the Terror, there were people led to the scaffold for having transformed wheat lands into artificial meadows. [^487]: A decree of January 15, 1811, charges the Minister of the Interior with taking measures to have one hundred thousand metric arpents of beets sown throughout the empire, and orders that a distribution plan be printed and sent to the prefects. [^488]: Decree of March 8, 1811. Fine of one hundred to one thousand francs against offenders; double in case of a repeat offense. [^489]: Decree of April 21, 1806. [^490]: Idem. [^491]: Inconvéniens, etc., du nouveau projet de Code forestier; 8vo, Paris, 1826, at Delaunay's. [^492]: Cours complet d'Écon. polit. prat., vol. II, p. 138. [^493]: "The land I have taken," writes a young Scottish farmer to his former master, "contains three hundred Scottish acres, divided into six enclosures, fairly well situated, within reach of lime and marl, and in a locality such that one can hope to sell products of all kinds and at an advantageous price." (See the Ann. agric. de Roville, vol. III, p. 266.) [^494]: See the Ann. agric. de Rov., vol. III, p. 205 et seq. [^495]: We shall see elsewhere that, on this question, political interest is in perfect accord with agricultural interest. [^496]: Here, according to M. Cordier (Agric. de la Fl. franç.), is how most rural operations are organized in Flanders: the farm is enclosed by a ditch filled with water that livestock cannot cross; the buildings are placed in the center and form a square courtyard; they are surrounded by orchards planted with fruit and forest trees, where the livestock are left; the fields are bordered by trees. One defends against the inclemency of the seasons by the variety of crops. By this means, one also ensures work for all times of the year. For ten months, one plows, sows, plants, and harvests almost every day. It thus happens that one is never either idle or rushed. [^497]: It finds itself, in this respect, in a more unfavorable situation than transport, which still lends itself to the use of these forces, although to a lesser degree than manufacturing (See above, p. 301). Of the three industries discussed so far, it is the one that profits the least from them. [^498]: Agric. de la Fl. franç., p. 149. [^499]: Id., p. 223. [^500]: Ann. agric. de Rov., vol. 1, p. 39. [^501]: Ann. agric. de Rov., vol. I, p. 41. [^502]: See above, p. 338 of this volume. [^503]: Agric. de la Fl. franc., p. 99. [^504]: See in the Edinb. Rev., issue of Oct. 1819, an article on the comparative industries of France and England. [^505]: Agric. de la Fl. franç., p. 120. [^506]: Id., pp. 94 and 96.