shed. Furthermore, the
laws under which property in France is inherited have promoted a
similarly wide distribution of personal estate. France is a rich
country; and its riches are much more evenly divided than is the case in
Great Britain, Germany, or the United States. There are fewer large
fortunes, and fewer cases of poverty. The average Frenchman is a small,
but extremely thrifty proprietor, who abhors speculation and is always
managing to add something to his accumulations; and the French economic
system is adapted to this peculiar distribution of wealth. The scarcity
in France of iron and coal has checked the tendency to industrial
organization on a huge scale. The strength of the French industrial
system does not consist in the large and efficient use of machinery, but
in its multitude of skilled craftsmen and the excellence of their
handiwork. In a system of this kind, labor naturally receives a large
percentage of the gross product, and a larger proportion of wage-earners
reach an independent economic position. At first sight it looks as if
France was something like a genuine economic democracy, and ought to
escape the evils which threaten other countries from an economic
organization, in which concentrated capital plays a more important part.

But the situation is not without another and less favorable aspect.
France, in becoming a country of small and extremely thrifty property
owners, has also become a country of partial economic parasites with
very little personal initiative and energy. Individual freedom has been
sacrificed to economic and social equality; and this economic and social
equality has not made for national cohesion. The bourgeois, the
mechanic, and the farmer, in so far as they have accumulated property,
are exhibiting an extremely calculating individualism, of which the most
dangerous symptom is the decline in the birth-rate. Frenchmen are
becoming more than ever disinclined to take the risks and assume the
expense of having more than one or two children. The recent outbreak of
anti-militarism is probably merely another illustration of the
increasing desire of the French bourgeois for personal security, and the
opportunity for personal enjoyment. To a foreigner it looks as if the
grave political and social risks, which the French nation has taken
since 1789, had gradually cultivated in individual Frenchmen an
excessive personal prudence, which adds to the store of national wealth,
but which