the people, make inquiries around him and penetrate into their habits
and customs, and he will find that the predominant feeling is love of
the spot on which they are born; the farmer will keep on the farm his
ancestors tilled before him for ages, and if offered a better farm, if
it be far removed from his home and that of his fathers he will reject
it; with the same tenacity the labourer clings to his cottage and the
little bit of land he has always delved. But it is with the landed
proprietor that one finds the most powerful example of the durability of
their adhesion to the cradle of their birth. There are many persons
possessed of estates of no great extent, from eight to fifteen hundred a
year, which have regularly descended to them from their ancestors, to
whom they have been granted, at as remote a period as the time of
Charlemagne, and have descended to the present possessors from
generation to generation, whilst there does not appear to have been in
all that period any great elevation or depression in their
circumstances. The habit of living up to their incomes as in England is
very rare in France; if they have daughters, from the day they are born
the parents begin to save for their dowry; even the peasant will follow
that practice if he can only put by a sou a day. I have known many
landed proprietors of from fifteen hundred to two thousand a year that
did not support any thing like the style that a person with a similar
fortune would in England; if a Frenchman has more than two or three
children, he seldom spends half his income if it be possible to live
upon a quarter, his object is that he may leave all his children in an
equal pecuniary position without dividing his land; as although the law
of primogeniture does not exist, yet parents like that one son should
keep up the estate intact, and the one fixed upon for that purpose is
generally the eldest, the others receive their portions in money from
the father's savings, and are usually brought up to one of the liberal
professions, and in many instances are sufficiently fortunate as to