the August wheat comes in, and concluding on short supplies for two, three and four months.  Such a state of inter-communication and of agriculture condemns a country to periodical famines, and I venture to state that, alongside of the small-pox which out of eight deaths causes one, another endemic disease exists, as prevalent and as destructive, and this disease is starvation.

We can easily imagine that it is the common people, and especially the peasants who suffers.  An increase of the price of bread prevents him from getting any, and even without that increase, he obtains it with difficulty.  Wheat bread cost, as today, three sous per pound,[32] but as the average day’s work brought only nineteen sous instead of forty, the day-laborer, working the same time, could buy only the half of a loaf instead of a full loaf[33].  Taking everything into account, and wages being estimated according to the price of grain, we find that the husbandman’s manual labor then procured him 959 litres of wheat, while nowadays it gives him 1,851 litres; his well-being, accordingly, has advanced ninety-three per cent., which suffices to show to what extent his predecessors suffered privations.  And these privations are peculiar to France.  Through analogous observations and estimates Arthur Young shows that in France those who lived on field labor, and they constituted the great majority, are seventy-six per cent. less comfortable than the same laborers in England, while they are seventy-six per cent. less well fed and well clothed, besides being worse treated in sickness and in health.  The result is that in seven-eighths of the kingdom, there are no farmers, but simply métayers (a kind of poor tenants)[34].  The peasant is too poor to undertake cultivation on his own account, possessing no agricultural capital[35].  “The proprietor, desirous of improving his land, finds no one to cultivate it but miserable creatures possessing only a pair of hands; he is obliged to advance everything for its cultivation at his own expense, animals, implements and seed, and even to advance the wherewithal to this tenant to feed him until the first crop comes in.” - “At Vatan, for example, in Berry, the tenants, almost every year, borrow bread of the proprietor in order to await the harvesting.” — “Very rarely is one found who is not indebted to his master at least one hundred livres a year.”

Frequently the latter proposes to abandon the entire crop to them on condition that they demand nothing of him during the year; “these miserable creatures” have refused; left to themselves, they would not be sure of keeping themselves alive. — In Limousin and in Angoumois their poverty is so great[36] “that, deducting the taxes to which they are subject, they have no more than from twenty-five to thirty livres each person per annum to spend; and not in money, it must be stated, but counting whatever they consume in kind out of the crops they produce.  Frequently