keeping an account of the produce; a more equable enjoyment, since he received every year the same price of his farm; and a more certain enjoyment, because he never ran the risk of losing his advances, and the cattle and other effects with which the Farmers had stocked his farm became a pledge which assured him of payment. Besides, the lease[1] being only for a few years, if his Farmer had given too low a price for his land he could augment it at the end of the lease.
S27
This last method is the most advantageous of all, but it presupposes a country already rich.
This method of putting out lands to farm is the most advantageous of all both to the Proprietors and to the Cultivators; it establishes itself everywhere where there are rich Cultivators, in a position to make the advances of the cultivation; and as rich Cultivators can provide the land with much more labour and manure, there results from it a prodigious increase in the produce and revenue of estates.[2]
In Picardy, Normandy, the neighbourhood of Paris, and in most of the Provinces of the North of France, the lands are cultivated by Farmers.[3] In the Provinces of the South they are cultivated by Métayers; the Provinces of the North of France are likewise incomparably richer and better cultivated than those of the South.
