Instead of seeking to improve it by more judicious cultivation, he gives it back to the desert for repose, and next year tills another portion. The custom of fallowing, a remnant of this half savage mode of agriculture, continues to our own time, in more than three-fourths of Europe.
But when population and wealth have at last increased so as to make every kind of labour easy, and when social order inspires security enough to induce the husbandman to fix his labour in the ground, and transmit it with the soil to his descendants, improvement altogether changes the appearance of the earth. Then are formed those plantations of gardens, orchards, vineyards, the enjoyment of which is destined for a late posterity; then are dug those canals for draining or irrigation, which diffuse fertility; then arise upon the hills those hanging terraces, which characterized the agriculture of ancient Canaan. A quick rotation of crops of a different nature reanimates, instead of exhausting, the strength of the soil; and a numerous population lives on a space, which, according to the primitive system, would hardly have supported a few scores of sheep.
The trade or the manufactures of a country, are not to be called prosperous, because a small number of merchants have amassed immense fortunes in it. On the contrary, their extraordinary profits almost always testify against the general prosperity of the country. So likewise, in counties abandoned to pasturage, the profits realized by some rich proprietors ought not to be regarded as indicating a judicious system of agriculture. Some individuals, it is true, grow rich; but the nation, which the land should maintain, or the food which should support it, are no where to be found. It is not even certain that the net produce of the land may not diminish, in proportion as its agriculture yields a more abundant produce, and a greater number of citizens live on its fruits; just as we see the net produce of money, or its interest, diminish in proportion as a country becomes more commercial, and contains more capital.
The first proprietors of land were doubtless themselves cultivators, and executed all kinds of field labour, with their children and servants. To these, in ancient times, were added slaves; the continual state of war, which exists among semi-barbarous societies, having introduced slavery at the remotest era. The stronger found it more convenient to procure workmen by the abuse of victory than by bargain. Yet so long as the head of each family laboured along with his children and slaves, the condition of the latter was less wretched; the master felt himself to be of the same nature with his servant; he experienced the same wants and the same fatigue; he desired the same pleasures, and knew, by experience, that he would obtain little work from a man whom he fed badly. Such was the patriarchal mode of cultivation, that of the golden days of Italy and Greece; such is that of free America; such appears to be that of Africa, in its interior; and such, finally, but without slavery, and therefore with still more domestic comfort, is that of Switzerland, where the peasant proprietor is happier than in any other country of the world.
Among the states of antiquity, the farms under cultivation were small; and the number of freemen labouring in the fields, always greatly surpassed that of slaves. The former had a full enjoyment of their persons and the fruits of their labour; the latter, degraded rather than unhappy, like the ox, man's companion, which interest teaches him to spare, seldom experienced suffering, want still more rarely. The head of each family alone receiving the total crop, did not distinguish the rent from the profit or the wages; with the excess of what he wanted for food, he procured the produce of the town in exchange, and this excess supported all other classes of the nation.
