This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer, had established fixed rules to work upon.He lent nothing to a peasant who bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of the purchase-money down.Rigou well understood the defects of the law of dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both to the Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out of the soil.How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of vines when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative body.What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are belittled and lost in a crowd.Rigou's law contains the essential element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as in the district of Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.
Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement.
Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to him.This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always in presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of the illegal interest.The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay only his five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be able to meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the land and getting double returns upon it.
Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call "small farming,"--a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising of cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but by the lower middle classes (see "Le Cure de Village.")