t the vast commons which lay waste throughout the Ile-de-France a
hundred years ago are now green with crops; meadows have replaced the
marshes; orchards and gardens on every side show what the Campagna of
Rome may become, at no distant day, if Italy can make her peace with the
Church, and the Italian capital remain, on terms of justice and reason,
the capital of the Catholic world.

Before the Revolution the Generality of Paris contained 150,000 arpents
of waste commons; the Generality of Soissons 120,000 arpents. In 1778 a
writer deplores the spectacle, 'within thirteen leagues of the capital,
of vast marshes left to be inundated because they are common lands,
producing not a single bundle of hay in a year, and affording scanty
pasture to a few miserable cattle.' In a single hamlet this writer found
35 poor families feeding 22 cows and 220 sheep on 1,100 arpents of
common land! I believe there are philanthropists in England and Scotland
who think the enclosure and cultivation of common lands a crime against
humanity; and it would be edifying to listen to a 'conference' between
them and the shrewd, prosperous small farmers and gardeners who are
tilling these great spaces to-day in the Ile-de-France. One of the few
plainly advantageous results of the headlong Revolution of 1789 was the
transfer into many private hands of the immense estates which were held
by the abbeys and the clergy in and around Paris; and this transfer
might perfectly well have been brought about by steady and systematic
means without shaking the foundations of property and of order. We might
then have seen throughout France what we see in England--the gradual and
pacific evolution of a great industrial and commercial society on lines
not contradicting, but conforming to, the traditions of the nation.

The influence of the capital, of course, has had much to do with the
extraordinary development in these regions of all kinds of horticulture.
Nurseries, kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens occupy an increasing area of
the Ile-de-France, and a constantly growing proportion of its
inhabitants. M. Baudrillart says that in the single Department of the
Seine-et-Oise this proportion has increased tenfold since 1860, and he
puts it down for that Department in 1880 at 50,000 persons out of a
total population of 577,798.

The proportions can hardly, I should think, be much smaller in the
Departments of the Aisne and of the Oise. How much this industry adds to
th