Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 15

THE BALANCE OF WORLD ECONOMY
9
people, but especially the peasants who formed the main sub-
stance of the population, could no more than just keep body
and soul together. In the event of crop-failure, for instance, they
sank below starvation level. In the official report from stewards
and missionaries during the crop-failure of 1663 it is stated that
“out of 200 persons in a village it is reckoned that 180 do not
get a meal of dry bread”; in some villages it is reported that
“dead children with their mouths full of grass” were found.
And there were dwellings “in which there were neither beds nor
clothes nor anything except manure, on which people slept and
with which they covered themselves”, and “they did not dare
to look up because wives and maids were completely naked.”1)
As late as in the i8th century there were 150000 serfs in France.2)
And in England the situation was not much better. One may
recall the revolutionary phase of the Chartist movement as late
as the end of the i83oies, the poor law of 1834 and the small
English export figures at the beginning of the i9th century. And
even then exports had increased little by little in the course of
the i8th century, so that at the end of that century they were
between 5 and 6 times as great as at the beginning of the cen-
tury.
But the figures are insignificant. In 1802 the export trade
of England only amounted to £ 41.400.000.3) If we take one
of the last normal years before 19x4, for instance 1912, we find
that in that year England exported goods valued at about £ 600
millions.
We need not go far to get an impression of the poverty and
lack of purchasing power in the Europe immediately before the
last century. We may stay at home. ¥e have a well known
annual account from 1780 of income and expenditure on a nor-
mal farm of some 80 acres of land. The revenue was 245.44
Kroner (about £ 13/13/—) and the expenditure 227.50 Kroner
(about £ 12/13/—) leaving a surplus of about £ 1, which was
hoarded, i. e. withdrawn from circulation. The accounts of a
similar farm were made in 1912 on the same lines as in 1780.
The revenue was now 5337.00 Kroner (about £ 300) and ex-
x) E. Lavisse: Histoire de France VII 1, p. 214, Paris 1902.
2) Rambaud: Histoire de la civilisation franfaise II p. 82, Paris 1910.
3) F. A. Ogg and Walther Rice Sharp: Development of modern Europe.
New York 1932.