ation or plea
of necessity. Besides tending to level the position of individuals,
the plan of equal distribution of property was said to be justifiable
on the ground that there are more than two parties concerned. Society,
it was alleged, comes in as a third, and says to the parent: 'You must
provide for this son, however worthless; you must not throw him
destitute on our hands; for that is to shift the responsibility from
yourself, who brought him into the world, to us, who have nothing to
do with him.' This plea, more plausible than sound, had its effect.
That an occasional wrong might not be inflicted, a great national
error, practically injurious, was committed.

A compulsory law of equal division of lands among the children of a
deceased proprietor, may be long in revealing its horrors in a country
where the redundant population sheds habitually off. In Switzerland,
for example, the evil of a subdivision of lands is marked but in a
moderate degree--though bad enough in the main--because a certain
proportion of each generation emigrates in quest of a livelihood--the
young men going off to be mercenary soldiers in Italy, waiters at
hotels, and so forth; and the young women to be governesses and
domestic servants. France, on the contrary, is the last nation in the
world to try the subdivision principle. Its people, with some trifling
exceptions, go nowhere, as if affecting to despise all the rest of the
world. Contented with moderate fortunes, inclined to make amusement
their occupation, unwilling or unable to learn foreign languages, or
to care for anything abroad, and having so intense a love of France,
that they will not emigrate, they necessarily settle down in a
gradually aggregating mass, and are driven to the very last shifts for
existence. Only two things have saved the nation from anarchy: the
remarkable circumstance of few families consisting of more than two,
or at most three children, any more being deemed a culpable
monstrosity; and the draughting of young men for the army. In other
words, the war-demon is an engine to keep the population in check; for
if it does not at once kill off men, it occupies them in military
affairs at the public expense. The prodigious number of civil posts
under government--said to be upwards of half a million--acts also as a
means for absorbing the overplus rural population.

Circumstances of the nature here pointed out have modified the evil
effects of the law of subdivisio