in the general cultivation of their respective portions. All the little proprietors are eager to find out how to farm so as to produce the greatest results: they diligently seek after improvements; they send their children to the agricultural schools in order to fit them to assist their fathers; and each proprietor soon adopts a new improvement introduced by any of his neighbours."[1] If this be not overstated, it denotes a state of intelligence very different not only from that of English labourers but of English farmers.
Mr. Kay's book, published in 1850, contains a mass of evidence gathered from observation and inquiries in many different parts of Europe, together with attestations from many distinguished writers, to the beneficial effects of peasant properties. Among the testimonies which he cites respecting their effect on agriculture, I select the following.
"Reichensperger, himself an inhabitant of that part of Prussia where the land is the most subdivided, has published a long and very elaborate work to show the admirable consequences of a system of freeholds in land. He expresses a very decided opinion that not only are the gross products of any given number of acres held and cultivated by small or peasant proprietors, greater than the gross products of an equal number of acres held by a few great proprietors, and cultivated by tenant farmers, but that the net products of the former, after deducting all the expenses of cultivation, are also greater than the net products of the latter. ... He mentions one fact which seems to prove that the fertility of the land in countries where the properties are small, must be rapidly increasing. He says that the price of the land which is divided into small properties in the Prussian Rhine provinces, is much higher, and has been
- ↑ The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and Europe; showing the results of the Primary Schools, and of the division of Landed Property in Foreign Countries. By Joseph Kay, Esq., M.A. Barrister-at-Law, and late Travelling Bachelor of the University of Cambridge. Vol. i. pp. 138—40.
