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It is especially Switzerland that ought to be surveyed and studied, in order to judge of the happiness of peasant proprietors. It is Switzerland that we should learn to know, in order to be convinced that agriculture, practised by the same persons who receive its fruits, can create great ease and comfort to a very numerous population; great independence of character, the result of independence of condition; a great commerce of consumption, arising from the real affluence of all the inhabitants, even in a country of which the climate is rude, the soil of only middling fertility, and where late frosts and inconstancy of seasons often disappoint the hopes of the agriculturist. It is impossible to see without admiration those wooden mansions of the humblest peasant, so large, so perfectly closed in, so well constructed, so loaded with carvings. In the interior large corridors separate the numerous chambers of the family; each chamber has but one bed, abundantly provided with curtains, coverlets, and the whitest linen, and surrounded by well-kept articles of furniture; the armoires are filled with linen, the dairy is large, airy, and of exquisite cleanness; under the same roof is found a great provision of corn, salted meat, cheese, and wood: in the cow-houses may be seen the most carefully tended and finest cattle in Europe; the garden is planted with flowers; both men and women are warmly and cleanly dressed, the latter preserving with pride their ancient costume, and all wearing in their faces the impress of health and vigour. Let other nations vaunt their opulence, Switzerland can always, with pride, oppose to them her peasantry.¹

When traversing nearly all Switzerland, and several provinces of France, Italy, and Germany, we have no need to ask, in passing each piece of land, if it belongs to a proprietor-cultivator or to a farmer. The intelligent care, the enjoyments prepared for the labourer, the adornment which the country has received from his hands, very soon point out the former. It is true that an oppressive government may destroy the comfort and brutalise the intelligence which ought to be the consequences of property; taxation may carry off the best part of the produce of the fields, the insolence of the agents of Government may disturb the security of the peasants, the impossibility of obtaining justice against a powerful neighbour may paralyse their minds by discouragement, and in the fine country lately restored to the administration of the King of Sardinia, the proprietor, no less than the day labourer, wears the uniform of indigence.²

In countries occupied in the patriarchal manner by small proprietors, population increases regularly and rapidly, until it has reached its natural limits; that is to say, inheritances continue to be divided and subdivided among several children, as long as by an additional application of labour each family can obtain an undiminished income from a smaller portion of land. The father who possessed a large extent of pasturage, divides it among his sons, who convert it into fields and meadows; these sons further subdivide it, to get rid of the system of fallows; every advance in agricultural knowledge permits a further division; but we need not fear that the proprietor will bring up children to make beggars of them. He knows exactly the inheritance which he is able to leave them; he knows that the law will divide it equally among them; he sees the limit at which this division would make them descend from the rank which he has himself occupied, and a legitimate family pride, no less real in the peasant than in the nobleman, makes him pause before calling into existence children whom he will be unable to provide for. If, notwithstanding, they are born, at least they do not marry, or they themselves select, among several brothers, the one who shall perpetuate the family. In the Swiss cantons we never find the patrimonies of the peasants subdivided to such a degree as to sink them below a state of honourable comfort, although the habit of foreign service, by opening to the young a career of undefined possibilities, gives some encouragement to a superabundant population.⁵

The peasant proprietor is, of all cultivators, the one who turns the soil to greatest account, because he is the one who thinks most of the future, and who is, besides, the most enlightened by experience. He is also the one who makes the most advantageous use of human labour, because, in distributing occupations among all the members of his family, he reserves employment for every day in the year, so that no one needs ever be idle. . . . He turns to the benefit of his children, and of the ages to come, every instant not required of him by the occupations of the seasons. A few moments are enough for planting the seed which, in a hundred years, will be a noble tree; for digging the trench which will permanently drain his field; for forming the conduit which will guide to it a rivulet of fresh water; for improving by cares often repeated, but in moments which would otherwise be wasted, all the different animals and vegetables by which he is surrounded. His little patrimony is a real bank for savings, ever ready to receive his small gains, to make profitable all his moments of leisure. The peasant has a lively feeling of the advantages enjoyed by a proprietor, and is always eager to buy land at any price. He pays more for it than it is worth, more than it will perhaps return to him; but how great reason has he to esteem highly the benefit of having always at hand an advantageous investment for his labour, without offering it by competition, and being always sure of bread when he wants it, without having to bid for it in the market! . . . Of all cultivators he is the most happy; and, in addition to this, never does the earth maintain in comfort, without exhausting its power, and provide with employment so many inhabitants on a given space, as when they are proprietors; and of all cultivators, the peasant proprietor gives most encouragement to commerce and manufactures, because of all cultivators he is the richest.⁶