Note 790 — Chapter II · : THE APOGEE AND DECLINE OF THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL. JOHN STUART MILL

But Young remained a champion of grande culture, while Mill was a complete convert to peasant proprietorship. But peasant proprietorship is proposed simply as a step towards association.

“The opinion expressed in a former part of this treatise respecting small landed properties and peasant proprietors may have made the reader anticipate that a wide diffusion of property in land is the resource on which I rely for exempting at least the agricultural labourers from exclusive dependence on labour for hire. Such, however, is not my opinion. I indeed deem that form of agricultural economy to be most groundlessly cried down, and to be greatly preferable in its aggregate effects on human happiness to hired labour in any form in which it exists at present. But the aim of improvement should be not solely to place human beings in a condition in which they will be able to do without one another, but to enable them to work with or for one another in relations not involving dependence.” (Principles, Book IV, chap. 7, § 4.)

Mill was not the only one who looked to peasant proprietorship partly to solve the social problem. Not to mention Sismondi, who was very much taken up with the idea, we have Thornton in England in his Plea for Peasant Proprietors (1848) and Hippolyte Passy in France in his excellent little volume Des Systèmes de Culture (1852) strongly advocating it. The Classical economists for the most part took the opposite point of view, especially Lavergne in his Essai sur l’Économie rurale de l’Angleterre.