SMALL PROPRIETORS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 35, 27 December 1873, Page 11

SMALL PROPRIETORS.

Me Howit, a writer whose habit it is to see all English objects and English socialities on their brightest side, and who, in treating of the Hheniah peasantry certainly does not underrate the rudeness of their implements and the inferiority of their ploughing, nevertheless shows that under the invigorating influence of the feelings of proprietorship they make up for the imperfections 'of their apparatus, by the intensity of their application. "The peasant harrows and clears his land until^it lain the nicest order, and it is admirable to see the crops which he obtains. The peasants are the great and ever present objects of country life. They are the great papulation of the country because they themselves are the possessors. This country is, in fact, for the most part, in the hands of the people. It is parcelled out among the multitude. .... The peasants are not as with us, for the most Sart totally cut off from property in the soil they cultivate, totally ependent on the labor afforded by others— they are themselves tlio proprietors. It is, perhaps from this cause that they are probably the most industrious peasantry in the world. They labor busily, early and late, because they feel they are laboring for themselves. ... The German peasants work hard, but they have no actual want. Every man has his house, his orchard, his roadside trees, commonly so heavy with fruit, that he is obliged to prop and secure them all ways, or they would be torn to pieces. He has his corn-plot, his plot for mangel-wurzel, for hemp, and so on. 3.c ia his owu master; and he, and every member of his family have the strongest motives to labor. You see the effect of this in that unremitting diligence which is beyond that of the whole world besides, and his economy which is still greater The Germans, indeed, are not so active and lively as the English You never see them in a bustle as though they wished to knock off a vast deal in a short time. . . . They are, on the contrary, slow, but for ever doing. They plod on from day to day and year to year the most patient, untireable and persevering of animals. The English peasant in so cut off from the idea of property, that he comes habitually to look upon it as a thing from which he is warned by the laws of the large proprietors, and becomes in consequence spiritless, purposeless .... The German bauer on the contrary looks on his country as made for him and his fellow aaen. He feeis himself a man ; he has a stake in the country as good as that of the bulk of his neighbours ; no man can threaten him with ejection, or the workhouse so lon» as he is active and economical. He walks therefore with a bold step,°he looks you in the face with the air ot a free man, but of a respectful one." Of their industry the same writer thus further speaks : «• There is not 1 an hour of the year in which they do not find increasing occupation. In the depth of winter, when the weather permits them by any means to get out of doors, they are always finding something to do. They carry out their manure to their lands while the frost is on them. If there is not frost they are bu»y cleaning ditches and felling old fruit trees or such as do not bear well. Such of them as are too poor to lay in a sufficient stock of wood, find plenty of work in ascending into the mountainous woods and bringing thence fuel. It would astonish the English common people to see the intense labor with which the Germans earn their firewood. In the depth of frost and snow, go into any of their hills and woods, and there you find them hacking up stumps cutting off branches, and gathering by all means which the official wood-police will allow, boughs, stakes, and pieces ot wood which they convey home bf the most incredible toil and patience." After a description of their careful and laborious vineyard culture, he continues : "In England, with its great quantity of grass lands, and its large farms, so soon as the grain is in, and the fields are shut up for hay-grass, the country seems in a comparative state ot rest and quiet. But here they are everywhere and for ever hoeing and mowing, planting and cutting, weeding and gathering. They have a succession of crops like a market gardener. They have.their carrots, poppies, hemp, flax, saintfoin, lucerne, rape, colewort, cabbage, rotabago, black turnip, Swedish and white turnips, teazles, Jerusalem artichokes, mangelwurzel, parsnips, kidney beans, field beans and peas, vetches, Indian corn, buckwheat, madder fur the manufacturer, potatoes, their groat crop of tobacco, millet— all, or the greater part, under the family man« agement, in their own family allotments. They have had these things first to sow, many of them to transplant, to hoe, to weed, to clear off insects, to top ; many of them to mow and gather in successive crops They have their water-meadows, of which kind almost all their meadows are, to flood, to mow, and reflood ; water-courses to re-open and to make anew, their early fruits to gather, to bring to market •with their green crops of vegetables ; their cattle, sheep, calves, foals most of them prisoners, and poultry to look after ; their vines, as they shoot rampantly in the summer heat, to prune, and thin out the leaves when they are too thick ; and any one may imagine what a scene of incessant labor it is." — Mill