renounce the patrimony of their parents; those who contract marriage agree to leave to the head of the family their share of the inheritance. It is the same with the sons, of whom some become priests, others emigrate, consenting not to claim their share of the property; and it is one of the sons who remains at home, working with the father and mother, who becomes in turn proprietor of the paternal dwelling. Thus the principle of the law of equal partition is eluded, and it comparatively seldom happens that the other children assert their claims, so accepted is the usage in the manners of the mountain.'

In Auvergne, as in the department of the Creuse, one reason for the great annual migration of the peasants to the towns, which, in France, where there is no exodus to foreign countries, goes by the name of emigration, is doubtless the comparative unproductiveness of mountain land. It cannot give bread to all the young men born on it. But a more potent reason, in Auvergne, though one less in accordance with old economic hypotheses, is that the younger sons, as the 'Enquête Agricole' states, seek a subsistence elsewhere in order to leave the property undivided to the elder brother; or occasionally it is the elder brother who emigrates, relinquishing his share to a younger one remaining at home. Thousands of Auvergnats are consequently to be found labouring in remote cities, as masons, sawyers, porters, water-carriers, blacksmiths, chimneysweeps; and it is a saying in the surrounding provinces, when some hard work has to be done, 'Il faut attendre le passage des Auvergnats.'

They have a character in French towns, and French novels, for clownishness and stupidity, derived doubtless from the nature of their occupations, as hewers of wood and drawers of water. But they show no lack of native shrewdness, according to my observation, when questioned on any subject. And M. de Lavergne remarked to me lately, that the Auvergnat displays more sagacity in timing his migration than the peasant of his own department, the Creuse-M. de Lavergne is deputy for the Creuse-does. The Auvergnat leaves his home at the beginning of winter, when the country is buried in snow, returning in summer, when work of different kinds is going on.

The Creuse peasant, on the other hand, goes to Paris, Lyons, or some other town, when summer is coming on, and comes back in winter, when there is nothing to do. Michelet taunts the Auvergne emigrants with bringing back some money, but no new ideas. The sum they bring to the poor department of the Cantal is put at five million francs (200,000) a year, in the report of the Enquête Agricole' on that department—a sum hardly to be despised. But the renunciation by the emigrants of their share in the family property certainly shows, if not an extraordinary imperviousness to new ideas, an extraordinary tenacity of old ones, and in particular of two ideas which are among the oldest in human society-subordination to the male head of the family, and conservation of the family property, unalienated and unpartitioned. The number of younger sons from these mountains who become priests is a still more remarkable phenomenon, though traceable in the main to the same causes. M. Bonnet, of Clermont-Ferrand, being asked in the course of his evidence before the 'Enquête Agricole,' what was the proportion of young men in the plain and the mountains, respectively, of the Puy-de Dôme, who devoted themselves to the clerical profession, replied, 'In the Limagne, very few young men devote themselves to the religious profession. It is from the mountains they come. Half the clergy of the diocese come from the arrondissement of Ambert.'

A few weeks ago, I happened myself to sit beside a party of priests at dinner, and learned that four out of the six were born in the Auvergne mountains, which likewise contribute largely to recruit the convents with nuns. M. Bonnet, being asked whether the mountain families do not induce the daughters to take religious vows, in order to prevent the partition of the family estate, replied, To that I answer in the affirmative. The parents, in consequence of the piety which reigns in the mountains, are not sorry to see their daughters embrace the religious profession, and at the same time to see the family property thereby less divided. In general, the eldest son remains at home, and the father frequently leaves to him the part disposable by will. And when a daughter enters a convent, if the portion she brings to it does not absorb her share in the

inheritance, she on her side usually makes her will in favour of the already favoured brother.'

6

Thus in the Auvergne mountains at this day, the younger brother sinks into the priest,' just as Sir Henry Maine describes him as doing under the influence of primogeniture in feudal society. The daughter, too, enters the convent just as she did in the middle ages, and from the same causes which actuated her then-family sentiment and male primogeniture on the one hand, and 'the piety which reigns in the mountains' on the other hand, which is in fact a survival of medieval piety, preserved by certain conditions of life and environment. A reason, it is true, sometimes assigned for the number of young women who become nuns in the department of the Puy-de-Dôme is that there are no girls' schools in the mountains; the daughters of parents who can afford it are, therefore, sent to convents to be educated, and the education they receive both unfits them and gives them a distaste for the rude life of a mountain farmhouse. They learn to make lace and embroidery, but not to mend stockings or to make butter or cheese. It is neverthless undisputed that religious feeling and family ideas fill the chief place among the motives which lead both the daughters to take vows, and the younger sons to become priests.

I have nowhere met with any attempt to trace to their ultimate causes the curious social phenomena just described; but one may, I think, point with certainty to the difference of environment and conditions of life in the mountain and in the plain, as the source of the superior force of religion, family feeling, and ancient usage in the former. On its moral and social side, the contrast between mountain and plain is the contrast between the old world and the new; between the customs, thoughts, and feelings of ancient and modern times. The principal sources of change and innovation in the plaintowns, manufactures, trade, easy communication with distant places, variety of occupation and manner of life—are inoperative in the mountains. Even in summer, the mountain lies aloof from the town and its life, communication between them is tedious for people on foot; the country carts are of the most primitive make, and drawn by slow oxen or cows; where a

heavy load has to be brought up hill on the best roads in the department, for instance, from Clermont towards Mont Dore, I have seen six horses yoked in a curious order to draw it-first one wheeler, then two abreast, with three leaders in tandem. In winter the whole mountain region is under snow, the roads are often impassable, and the members of the mountain family are shut up together with their dumb companions, the cattle. Then the life of the mountain pastoral farmer is the same from father to son, and from age to age; the whole neighbourhood too follows the same occupation, and leads the same life, so that there is a surrounding mass of uniform and primitive usage and thought. But the family is the earliest of social bonds, and it is by studying it as it survives in places such as the Auvergne mountains, that we can best realize something of the force of that ancient bond, and something of the nature of the sentiments which led to the patriarchal authority of the elder brother, on the one hand, and the conservation of the family property under his guardianship and control on the other. Sir Henry Maine calls the origin of primogeniture, as affecting the devolution of land in the middle ages, one of the most difficult problems of historical jurisprudence; and it has a peculiar difficulty in England to which he has not referred. How was it that during a period when society was decidedly becoming more orderly, and patriarchal rule was giving place to regular government, the division of socage lands among all the sons was superseded by primogeniture, the principle already established in the case of land held in military tenure? A tendency to uniformity in the law, produced by the institution of itinerant royal courts, and the bias of the judges, contributed probably to the change; but something more is required to explain it. The courts proceeded to make custom, instead of the old law of gavelkind, determine the succession to socage lands; but the question follows, how did a custom come into existence contrary to the old law, and to the apparent interest of the majority of the family? And the existence at this day, in the Auvergne mountains, of a custom directly opposed to the positive law of the land helps us to understand how the English courts were supported by family

feeling in assuming a custom of primogeniture contrary to the old law of division.

The force of religious feeling, 'the piety which reigns in the mountains,' as M. Bonnet calls it in a passage cited above, has its root, doubtless, partly in the same conservation of ancient sentiment, thought, and belief, which gives the family property to one son, partly in other ideas and feelings generated by the conditions of mountain life. As the difference between the mountain and plain is a phase of the difference between the old world and the new, so is it a phase of the difference between country and town. The mountain is as it were the country in its rudest primitive form, while the plain is as it were a great suburb of the towns it contains and has continual intercourse with. The 'petit propriétaire' in the Limagne has the money-making spirit as strongly developed as the town tradesman; sometimes he himself lives in the town, and in any case he has frequent transactions of buying, selling, and other relations with it. But the money-making and commercial spirit evidently tends to individualism, and to the disintegration of the family; and it has ever been found also to foster a secular spirit and repugnance to sacerdotal dominion. In towns, moreover, and also (though in a smaller degree) in the surrounding plain, men see chiefly the power of man, and unconsciously gather confidence from their own numbers against both the powers of nature, which are supreme in the mountain, and those supernatural powers which the powers of nature suggest to rude minds. The difference between the force of religious sentiment and reverence for the clergy in town and country in Catholic countries is striking. One has but to look at the way in which a Flanders priest is saluted in the streets of Ghent, for instance, and at some miles distance in the country, for evidence of the opposite influence in this respect of town and country life. At Clermont-Ferrand, the respectable working-man commonly holds aloof from the clergy, declines their aid, even when in need, and is averse from joining societies for the mutual benefit of the members, because the clergy take a part in their management. Indications of the prevailing disposition in that town towards ecclesiastical