AGRICULTURE IN FRANCE--ITS BACKWARD STATE--CENTRALISING TENDENCY--SUBDIVISION OF PROPERTY--ITS EFFECTS--FRENCH "ENCUMBERED ESTATES." In the foregoing pages I have sketched, with as much regard to a readable liveliness, and to vivid local colouring as I could command, the features and incidents of part--the most interesting one--of an extended journey through France. My primary purpose in undertaking the latter was, to prepare a view of the social and agricultural condition of the peasantry, for publication in the columns of the _Morning Chronicle_; and accordingly a series of letters, devoted to that important subject, duly appeared. These communications, however, were necessarily confined to statements of agricultural progress, and the investigation of solid social subjects, to the exclusion of those matters of personal incident and artistic, literary, and legendary significance, which naturally occur in the prosecution of a desultory and inquiring journey. To this latter field--that of the tourist rather than the commissioner--then, I have devoted the foregoing chapters; but I am unwilling to send them forth without appending to them--extracted from my concluding Letter in the _Morning Chronicle_--a summary of my impressions of the social condition of the French agricultural population, and the effects of the system of the infinitesimal division of the land. These impressions are founded upon a five months' journey through France, keeping mainly in the country places, being constantly in communication with the people themselves, and hearing also the opinions of the priests and men of business engaged in rural affairs, as well as reading authors upon all sides of the question. My conclusions I have summed up carefully, and with great deliberation; and I offer them as an honest, and not ill-founded estimate of the present state and future prospects of rural France.