The most wonderful adaptations of the small industries to new requirements, and substantial technical progress in the methods of production, can be noted at the same time. It may even be said of France, as it has been said of Russia, that when a rural industry dies out, the cause of its decay is found much less in the competition of rival factories--in hundreds of localities the small industry undergoes a complete modification, or it changes its character in such cases--than in the decay of the population _as agriculturists_. Continually we see that only when the small landholders have been ruined, as such, by a group of causes--the loss of communal meadows, or abnormally high rents, or the havoc made in some locality by the _marchands de biens_ (swindlers enticing the peasants to buy land on credit), or the bankruptcy of some shareholders’ company whose shares had been eagerly taken by the peasants[140]--only then do they abandon both the land and the rural industry and emigrate towards the towns. Otherwise, a new industry always grows up when the competition of the factory becomes too acute--a wonderful, hardly suspected adaptability being displayed by the small industries; or else the rural artisans resort to some form of intensive farming, gardening, etc., and in the meantime some other industry makes its appearance. A closer study of France under this aspect is instructive in a high degree. It is evident that in most textile industries the power-loom supersedes the hand-loom, and the factory takes, or has taken already, the place of the cottage industry. Cottons, plain linen, and machine-made lace are now produced at such a low cost by machinery that hand-weaving evidently becomes an anachronism for the plainest descriptions of such goods. Consequently, though there were in France, in the year 1876, 328,300 hand-looms as against 121,340 power-looms, it may safely be taken that the number of the former has been considerably reduced within the next twenty years. However, the slowness with which this change is being accomplished is one of the most striking features of the present industrial organisation of the textile trades of France.