The Agricultural Crisis.

The following article, written in France and for France by French journalist signing "D. G.," applied more or less appropriately to all civilized countries, and states truths especially important to students of the Irish land question:-

To exhaust industry under the pretext of cheapening products, to kill finance by stock-jobbing and agricultural by usury, rent, and expropriation, and then to shout, "Let us protect and encourage industry and agriculture, and improve our financial condition," - such is the economic programs of certain men who treat French labor as a simple stock-exchange value and speculate by turns on the prosperity and ruin of a great nation.

In that which concerns more particularly agriculture and the protection which it merits we know what complaints are made daily to the authorities by farmers and especially by land proprietors, who, to the exclusion of other country people,  have a voice in the matter. Now phylloxera is the trouble, now American competition, now the bad crops. And the government promises a decrease of the land tax, agricultural instruction, agricultural credit, etc., which sound very well in electoral programme.

It is beyond question that agriculture to-day is passing through a crisis. What is its intensity and what is its cause? Generally, in judging these economic revolutions, we commit the error of consulting statistical tables alone and of considering only the quantity or value of products, without reflecting that it is not true that, in the present state of landed property with us, the progress of agriculture is a problem that cannot be solved.

It is known that out of twenty millions of people devoted to agriculture, seven or eight million are proprietors cultivating their own land; they are found generally on small or medium estates and live in comparative ease, provided they do not allow themselves to get entangled in a mesh work of mortgages. As to the other twelve millions they are composed, first, of farmers submitted to the pressing and extortionate conditions of a lease, and then of laborers whose pitiful conditions, sometimes worse than that of the workingmen of the cities, seems less glaring because not as familiar and because among this class of disinherited any cooperative union, any collective demand for justice is impossible.

Whatever they may do, these twelve millions of men will never become proprietors. Let agricultural schools be organized! Result: a decrease in the cost of production, a larger product. But the inflexible theory of net product always confronts the farmer; they will sow, but the harvest will benefit the proprietors. Let the land tax be reduced! The reduction will not yield them a cent. Let the city tolls be abolished! The cities will offer to the products of the country a larger market, whence will result an increase in the value of the land for the proprietors and an increase of rent against the tenant. The advantage is then offset by the loss. Whatever reform may be attempted in the direction which it is now proposed to take, on whatever side the professed reformers and pseudo-philanthropists may turn, they invariably bring up against the theory of rent: the landlord proprietor always taking the excess of the gross product over the cost of production, in a word the whole net product, and the tenant scarcely recovers his investment.  As for the farm-hands, servants, and other agricultural laborers, they only receive contemptible wages. The proprietor speculates on the farmer, the farmer on them, and often their situation is to precarious that they are forced to the factories to avoid starvation, as the emigration from the fields to the city forcibly proves

Let political economy strike up the usual straining about the benefits of economy. Its teachings and advice, always addressed to those who do not need them or cannot profit by them, seem like a cruel jest to those men, workers in city or country, who cannot economize.

Admirers of achievement, the economists have codified abuses and given the name of science to this collection of general principles which regulate the exploitation of man by man. No more on this question than on those of industrialism, free trade, taxation, have they been able to grasp the difference between demanded rights and existing facts.

It is said on all sides, and with reason, that, to develop agricultural forces of a country, it is necessary to make use of new processes and especially not to fear to devote large amounts of capital to the cultivation of land. But who will furnish this capital? The tenant, for land that does not belong to him? He will guard well against that, and, if he has saved something, he will consider rather the purchase of a bit of land. The Landlord? Better worth his while to invest his capital in manufacturing enterprise and to speculate; for - and there lies the evil - land is less profitable than the stock exchange. Instead of improving the soil and applying to it the best systems of cultivation, the landed proprietors, who generally does not even know his estates and who, and in any case, has no experience in farming, will content himself with receiving his rents which he will try to raise, little by little, so that at last well-cultivated lands will be found only among those who themselves add to the value of the soil which they own.

And this observation comes to the support of the complaints of the economists against absenteeism, as if absenteeism was not the forced result of the present form of property in land, and as if every proprietor not a cultivator was not necessarily and absentee. Further, by the periodical demands of rent, the proprietor forces the tenant to exhaust the land, an event that generally occurs toward the expiration of the lease, hence an evident loss for society. There lies an evil which no legal remedy can alleviate and the cause of which must be sought for in the constitution of landed property itself.

It must be confessed that of the problem now before us the French Revolution has furnished no satisfactory solution. It has destroyed feudalism, but what has it put in its place? Another feudalism. "The land of France is free throughout its whole extent," says the law of September 28, 1791. But is the peasant free? Is he free when, in law and in fact, he can be evicted, without compensation, from an estate the value of which he has doubled? On this point, the Revolution did not complete its work. Its principles suffice to organize government, or rather on the ruins of government they build autonomy; but, to organize labor, they are insufficient. The Revolution abolished the personally inequality of rights; real inequality survived it, and it has been forgotten that privilege is organic in a society when some can rest and consume without working while others can labor without hope. "The liberty of the proletaire," said Proudhon, "is the right to labor - that is, to be robbed - or not to labor - that is, to starve. Liberty now benefits none but the strong."

It is then outside of the Revolution itself, and by devoting itself to the study and accomplishment of what the Revolution did not study and accomplish, that social science must henceforth do its work. In the place of the feudalism of the nobility we see to-day an industrial and mercantile feudalism, more powerful than the other. Industry has led to industrialism; so agriculture inclines to become industrial; the machine will hunt the peasant from the field as it has hunted the workman from the shop. The proprietor, the capitalist, will alone remain. Everywhere will be effected a concentration of capital accompanied by a corresponding impoverishment of the masses; for, even when the total wealth of a country increases, the number of the poor may increase also. And that will last until the day when the antagonism in economic society shall have reached that degree of bitterness which, in 1789, made inevitable and fatal the overturning of political society. Excess of abuse leads to reforms. But so  rarely does society adopt means of prevention that in social progress it is necessary to exhaust each of the series composing it, and that it is never noticed that the bow is bent too far until it breaks.