With such a fine name in prospect, I wonder any peasant lad is lured from the country to the big, unsatisfactory towns, as M. Bazin laments in his tale of the _métayer_ and his sons. In the _métairie_ system the partnership between landlord and _métayer_ is worked in this wise. The landlord supplies stock, land, and implements; the _métayer_ brings the labour, and the profits are equally divided. The _métayer_ boards his labourers, and their wages vary, according to season, from seventy-five centimes to two and a half francs per day. The agent, on this system, is done away with, and the landlord and his partner stand as man to man. The artisan, too, in the country enjoys a pleasant independence. He builds his own house, he makes and maintains his own home with thrift and ambition. The standard of honesty is high. There is little beggary or drunkenness, and early marriages are frequent. Of course the peasant is grasping,—it were idle to hide this, even in praising his frugality. He is close-fisted and hard-headed, and would rather part with his blood than with a franc; but he and his brother, the artisan, have made, and help to keep, France where she is. However deplorable the pictures of their land which French novelists and story-tellers may offer us, we may believe, without fear of error, that it is not _La Terre_ which represents the French peasantry, so human and so lovable, despite its lack of disinterestedness and generosity; and it is not M. Octave Mirbeau’s appalling heroine who represents the great hard-working, honest, and intelligent artisan class. Both of them have qualities above and beyond any to be looked for in the same classes elsewhere; and if there were nothing else to admire, surely we must find admirable their rectitude and their love of independence. [Illustration] CHAPTER IX THE PRESS AND THE PEOPLE’S COLLEGES