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They imagine, then though they do not say so a royal or presidential decree: "Art. 1. Let all men become métayers!" And it does not occur to them that if métayage, which was the rule, has become a less and less frequent exception, this must be the necessary result of natural causes.
And the system of métayage does at least give the tenant the tranquillizing assurance that he will reach the end of the year without experiencing all the horrors of enforced idleness to which the ordinary day or wage laborers are condemned in both city and country.
Adjoining such large holdings are small freeholds farmed by their peasant owners dairy farms of a few acres, market-gardens of one or two, and so on. Metayage, or the system of half-profits, is rarely found in the Cantal.
They had a portion of their land tilled by Russian peasants, and ceded to these a part of the produce in return for the labour expended; in other words, they assumed the position of landed proprietors, and farmed part of their land on the metayage system. The process of transition had reached this point in several aouls which I visited.
They could employ the peasants of the neighbouring villages to prepare the land and reap the crops either for a fixed sum per acre or on the metayage system, or they could let their land to the peasants for one, three or six years at a moderate rent.
Here, as everywhere else throughout France, a great diversity may be seen in the matter of land tenure peasant properties from five acres upwards, large holdings either let on lease, as in England, cultivated by their owners, or lastly, as in the present instance, managed by farm stewards. The system of metayage, or half- profits, is not in force.
They are, like the rudimentary organs of the higher species of animals, according to the theory of Darwin, permanent witnesses of past epochs. The same Darwinian and economic law applies to métayage, which is also evidently destined to the same fate as handicrafts. Conf. the excellent propagandist pamphlet of BIEL, Ai contadini toscani, Colle d' Elsa, 1894.
Between groves of veteran olives and rocks rising higher and higher, we climb for an hour and a half, then leaving behind us the wide panorama of Nice, Cimiez, the sea, and villa-dotted hills, take a winding inland road, as beautiful as can be imagined. This modified system of metayage or half profits is common here, and certainly affords a stepping-stone to better things.
He was a true lover of birds, and by observing them had stored up in his mind a fund of curious knowledge respecting their characters and habits. He only worked a portion of his land with the aid of the servants of the chateau; the rest was farmed on the system of metayage, for which he had a very strong liking.
Metayage, or the system of sharing results between the landowner and the labouring peasant, still flourishes in France, notwithstanding the severe denunciations passed upon it by various writers.
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