The accumulation of real estate into a small number of hands does not only accidentally result in misery for a part of the agricultural population; it suggests ideas and habits to a large number of that population that must necessarily, in the long term, bring them to misery.
What do we see each day before our own eyes? Which members of the inferior classes indulge the most willingly in all the excesses of intemperance and who enjoy living as if there were no tomorrow? Who show the most improvidence in everything? Who contract early and imprudent marriages whose only purpose seems to be the multiplication of unhappy people on the earth?
The answer is easy. These are the proletariat, those who have no property under the sun but their hands. So long as these same men come to own some piece of land, no matter how small, is it not obvious how their ideas and habits change? Is it not visible that with some landed property some thought about the future occurs to them? They become solicitous for the future from the moment that they feel that they have something valuable to lose. Once they believe that they have the means to put themselves and their children outside misery’s reach, they take energetic measures to escape it and they try, through short-term privation, to assure to themselves a lasting welfare. These people are not wealthy yet, but they already have the qualities that give rise to wealth. Franklin often said that with order, activity, and economy, the road to fortune was just as easy as going to market. He was right.
Thus it is not poverty that causes the disorganized and improvident farmer; because with a very small field, he can still be very poor. It is the complete absence of all property; it is the absolute dependence on luck.
In addition, I say that among the ways to give people the feeling of order, activity, and economy, I know of no more powerful one than to facilitate their acquisition of real estate.
I cite again here the example of the English. The peasants of England are perhaps, all things considered, more enlightened and they do not show themselves less hardworking than our own. Why do they, in general, live in such brutal carelessness of the future, the idea of which we do not even have? From whence comes the disordered taste for intemperance among an even-tempered people? It is easy to say: in England, the laws and habits are combined in such a way that no part of the land ever falls into the possession of the poor. His welfare and even his existence never depends on himself, but on the will of the rich, over whom he has no power and who can, if they please, deny or offer him work. Having no direct or permanent influence on his own future, he stops thinking about it and willingly forgets that it even exists.
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