Of the 17,000,000 of the population who are more or less dependent upon agriculture for their livelihood, only about 6,500,000 actually work on the soil. Those who own holdings of less than twenty-five acres number nearly 3,000,000, and the total area of land held in this way is something between 15 and 20 per cent of the whole cultivated area. About three-quarters of a million persons possess the balance. The sizes of the holdings, of course, vary enormously. Besides those who own their land, there is the large class of _metayers_, who are part of a complicated system which persists in spite of its theoretical impossibility of smooth working. Where a landowner is a _gentilhomme campagnard_, he will in most cases have a few farms attached to his residence, which is always _le chateau_ to the peasant, however difficult to discover its old-time manorial splendours may have become. The farmers who work for the landowner are not rent-payers: they merely share with him in the results of their labour, a system of co-operation which results in very close relations between landlord and farmer. No hard and fast rules are followed as to the proportion of the crops which falls to the landlord, or what share he has of the cattle. It is common for him to furnish draught animals as well as seed and implements. This system is limited very much to those districts where agriculture has stood still for a very long period, such as the Limousin, and the total of the land worked on the _metayage_ system is only 7 per cent of the whole of the cultivated land. To this day the methods of husbandry maintained in the less accessible departments are scarcely ahead of the Romans, and on the slopes of the Pyrenees one may still see the flail in use for threshing purposes, while the plough with a wooden share, which seems likely to hold its own for a long time to come in certain of the mountainous districts, is the same as those depicted by prehistoric sculptors high on the rock-faces of Monte Bego on the Franco-Italian frontier. In the greatest part of France oxen are used for draught purposes, and these picturesque, cream-coloured beasts, yoked to curious big-wheeled country carts, are always an added charm to the country road. Whether they are seen patiently plodding along a white and dusty perspective of tree-bordered road, or are standing quietly in a farmyard with lowered heads while the queer tumbril behind them is being loaded, they have picture-making qualities which the horse lacks.