owner 3,600 livres, pays 1,800
livres to the king, and 1,311 livres to the tithe owner; another, in the
Soissonnais, rented for 4,500 livres, pays 2,200 livres taxes and more
than 1,000 livres to the tithes. An ordinary metayer-farm near Nevers
pays into the treasury 138 livres, 121 livres to the church, and
114 livres to the proprietor. On another, in Poitou, the fisc (tax
authorities) absorbs 348 livres, and the proprietor receives only 238.
In general, in the regions of large farms, the proprietor obtains ten
livres the arpent if the cultivation is very good, and three livres when
ordinary. In the regions of small farms, and of the metayer system, he
gets fifteen sous the arpent, eight sous and even six sous. The entire
net profit may be said to go to the church and into the State treasury.

Hired labor, meantime, is no less costly. On this metayer-farm in
Poitou, which brings in eight sous the arpent, thirty-six laborers
consume each twenty-six francs per annum in rye, two francs respectively
in vegetables, oil and milk preparations, and two francs ten sous in
pork, amounting to a sum total, each year, for each person, of sixteen
pounds of meat at an expense of thirty-six francs. In fact they drink
water only, use rape-seed oil for soup and for light, never taste
butter, and dress themselves in materials made of the wool and hair of
the sheep and goats they raise. They purchase nothing save the tools
necessary to make the fabrics of which these provide the material. On
another metayer-farm, on the confines of la Marche and Berry, forty-six
laborers cost a smaller sum, each one consuming only the value of
twenty-five francs per annum. We can judge by this of the exorbitant
share appropriated to themselves by the Church and State, since, at so
small a cost of cultivation, the proprietor finds in his pocket, at the
end of the year, six or eight sous per arpent out of which, if plebeian,
he must still pay the dues to his seignior, contribute to the common
purse for the militia, buy his taxed salt and work out his corvee and
the rest. Towards the end of the reign of Louis XV in Limousin, says
Turgot,[5203] the king derives for himself alone "about as much from the
soil as the proprietor." In a certain election-district, that of Tulle,
where he abstracts fifty-six and one-half per cent. of the product,
there remains to the latter forty-three and one-half per cent. thus
accounting for "a multitude of domains being abandoned