ols (sixpence) per acre, and would be sold at about
a Louis d'or, which in three years, under English management, would be
richly worth thirty pounds. What a country would this be to purchase in,
if with himself an Englishman or an American could transport his own
labourers and ideas. But nothing is to be done without assistance.

Many of the French landlords retain a great portion of their estates in
their own hands, and cultivate it with more knowledge and with more
liberality than their farmers. A gentleman, farming his own lands, is
always useful to the country, if not to himself. He may improve his
lands beyond their worth--he may ruin himself, therefore, but the
country is proportionately benefitted by having so many good acres where
it had before so many bad. Some of the restored Emigrants have most
peculiarly benefitted France, by bringing into it English improvements.
I have more than once had occasion to remark, that this change is
visible in many parts of the kingdom, and will produce in time still
more important effects.

The price of land is by two-thirds cheaper than in England, I am
speaking now of the Nivernois and Bourboranois. It is generally about
eighteen or twenty years purchase of the rent. If the rent be about
300_l_. English for about five hundred acres of land--half arable, a
fourth forest, and a fourth waste--the purchase will be about 5500
guineas. The very same estate in any part of England would be about
15,000. But in England the forest and waste would be brought into
cultivation. The forest is here little better than a waste, and the
waste is turned to as little purpose as if it were the wild sea beach.

The farms in the Nivernois are very small; the farmers are by natural
consequence poor. They have neither the spirit nor the means of
improvement. They are in fact but a richer kind of peasantry. Those
writers have surely never lived in the country, who urge the national
utility of small farms. The immediate consequences of small farms are
an overflow of population, and such a division and sub-division of
sustenance, as to reduce the poor to the lowest possible point of
sustenance. Population, within certain limits, may doubtless constitute
the strength of a nation; but who will contend, that a nation of
beggars, a nation overflowing with a starved miserable superfluity, is
in a condition of enviable strength?

There are few or no leases in these provinces, and this is doubtless one
of