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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 10, 29 June 1883, Page 21

M. Nunaa Droz, a member of the Swiss Federal Council, and an ux-President of the Confederation, contributes to tbe Billiotheque Unirerselle et Revue Suisse, a paper that well deserves attention of English agriculturists, on the crisis from which the occupying owners of the Continent are suffering hardly less acutely than the farmers and landowners of the United Kingdom. In England the severity of the crisis is denoted by abandoned farms and reduced rents ; on the Continent by the growing indebtedness of peasant proprietors ard the increasing frequency of foreclosures. "The average peasant," wrote a short time ago the Baron von Thiiogen, in an open letter to Prince Bismarck, "is fast disappearing. Rich capitalists are buying up at low prices much land, which they souvert into pasture. Small agriculturists are fast becoming what they were 200 years H since— simple shepherds. A part of the country-people emigrate ; the rest become social democrats. . . . The failures of peasants are like an avalanche ; real property is depreciated to the lowest point ; the best secured mortgages are not covered in case of liquidation ; the populations of entire districts no longer work for themselves, but as serfs of usurers, who chase them from their faims when they think &t.—Land t The Bey. J. Russell, the well-known Devonshire bunting parson, died at his residence, Black Torrington Rectory, on Saturday, April 28. Deceased, who was 88 years of age, had been gradually sinking for several months, but was in the hunting field up to last season!