Let us now examine the agricultural system of Belgium, to which reference is often made. Fortunately, in the work of M. De Laveleye, we possess a text book on the subject of European celebrity.
According to popular belief Belgium is cultivated by a peasant proprietary twice as numerous in proportion to the area they occupy as the agricultural population of Ireland, living in peculiarly easy circumstances, and affording unmistakeable evidence of the advantages of la petite culture. The real facts are these:—That, making a proportionate deduction for the population employed on the pasture lands of both countries, the total population dependent on tillage in Ireland is probably almost as dense as that of Belgium. That the greater portion of Belgium is cultivated, not by small proprietors, but by tenants (and almost entirely so wherever la petite culture is carried to
system with all the disadvantages, and scarcely any of the benefits, of small properties; since he must either live in indigence on the produce of his land, or depend as habitually as if he had no landed possessions, on the wages of hired labour; which, besides, if all the holdings surrounding him are of similar dimensions, he has little prospect of finding.
"The benefits of peasant properties are conditional on their not being too much subdivided; that is, on their not being required to maintain too many persons, in proportion to the produce that can be raised from them by those persons. The question resolves itself, like most questions respecting the condition of the labouring classes, into one of population. Are small properties a stimulus to undue multiplication, or a check to it?"—Mill's Political Economy, p. 346.
