Second Memoir on Pauperism, Post 1

I tried to show in a preceding article, that, in our time, private and public charity are powerless to cure the  misery of the poor classes; it only remains to look for ways that could be used to prevent the misery in the first place.

A subject such as this is nearly without natural limits and I feel the need to observe limits not inherent to the subject itself.

Among those whose position places over the limits and to whom the subject of this article applies, it is convenient to establish two categories: on one side are the poor who belong to the agricultural class; on the other, the poor who depend on the industrial classes.  These two sides of my subject must be carried out and examined in detail at least as far as the limits of this article permit.

I will only touch on what is relevant to the agricultural classes, because the great problems of the future do not come from that quarter.

In France, substitutions have been abolished and the equal division of inheritance has penetrated into custom at the same time that it has been established in law.  It is certain then that in France, real estate will never tend to agglomerate into a few hands, as is still seen in some parts of Europe.

But the division of land that, at one time at least, could work against agricultural progress in preventing accumulation of capital into the hands of proprietors with the desire to innovate, produces the immense good of preventing the development of pauperism among the agricultural classes.  When the peasant does not own any part of the land, as is the case in England, the whims or avarice of the masters can suddenly inflict terrible misery on them.  This is easily understood.  The same number of men is not at all necessary to the production of different types of crops, nor required by all methods of cultivation.

When you convert, for example, a field of wheat into pasture, a shepherd can easily replace a hundred laborers.  When, instead of twenty small farms, you combine them into one large one, a hundred men will be enough to cultivate the same fields that used to require four hundred hands.  In the point of view of farming, the conversion of wheat fields into pastures and the consolidation of small farms into large domains is perhaps progress, but the peasant at whose expense these measures are accomplished cannot help but suffer.  I have heard mentioned about a rich Scottish landowner that a change in the way his lands are administered and cultivated have forced three thousand peasants to leave their homes and go seek their fortune elsewhere.   The agricultural population of that Scottish county has therefore found itself suddenly exposed to the same miseries that continually affect industrial populations when new machines are invented.

Such events, that give rise to pauperism in the agricultural classes, increase to an even greater extent among the industrial classes.  Men who are violently separated thus from the cultivation of the soil look for refuge in workshops and factories.  The industrial class therefore does not only grow in an organic and fragmentary way, following the needs of industry, but without warning and by an artificial process following the misery of the agricultural classes, which does not delay in producing a surplus of laborers and destroying the balance that should always be maintained between consumption and production.