THE CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS IN SMALL AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS.
AWRITER in the Times, whose communication was honoured with large type, suggests that some of the many holiday-makers who will spend their vacation abroad should give us an unprejudiced account of the condition of peasant-proprietors on the Continent. We have some doubt whether, if this advice is followed, we shall be any nearer to a conclusion which may serve our turn in our own country. Unprejudiced accounts are hard to come by. Even on foreign farms men are apt to find what they look for, and it would not surprise us to have two very different estimates of peasant prosperity from men whose data had been gathered from the very same instances. Moreover, the conditions under which peasant-proprietorship would be tried in this country are so different from those which exist in France or Switzerland, that even if we were quite sure that the experiment had succeeded or failed abroad it might not follow that it would equally succeed or fail at home. In France, in particular, all conclusions unfavourable to peasant-proprietor- ship are vitiated by the peculiar kind of division to which land is there subjected at the death of the owner. An estate is not simply broken up into as many portions as there are children. The principle of distribution is that each child has not merely his share of the whole, but his share of each separate part. Thus each owner has a bit here and a bit there, and a great deal of his time is spent in going from one to the other. There would be no need to include this in- convenient arrangement when importing similar ownership into England. It must be remembered, too, that as regards France the whole question is complicated, not merely by the method of dividing estates, but by the necessity of dividing them. There is no probability that any such law as this will be introduced into England. The idea of the English land-reformer is usually to put realty on the footing of personalty—that is, to divide it equally among the children in case of intestacy, but to leave the owner free to leave it to whom he likes. Where the property is large, the tendency of this change would be towards subdivision. The rule pre- scribed by the law in the absence of bequest would more and more be adopted in framing wills. But where the property contains no more than a single man can cultivate, the conse- quences of subdivision would be too obvious to make its adoption at all likely. There are reasons for expecting a more favourable result from peasant-proprietorship in England than it has often yielded in France. On the other hand, there are other reasons which suggest that success in France does not of necessity imply success here. The conditions of soil and climate which prevail in the two countries are too dissimilar to make any more encouraging inference safe. Nor is the difference less when we come to moral conditions. The French peasant has had his character formed by generations of ownership. The land has been the one object of his ambition from a time long anterior to the Revolution. Thrift and industry are now inbred qualities with him. In England they are qualities which have still in a great measure to be created. They exist, no doubt, in individuals, but they are not yet shared by a whole class. Consequently, unless some means are taken to discover those who possess them, and, in the first instance, to limit the experiment to those who have come through the trial successfully, the chances are that it will fail from the mere inability of the small owner to do justice to the land. The things to bear in mind are that in England peasant- proprietorship is a novelty, that the experience of other countries gives us very little information, and that what little is known points to the need of exercising the utmost caution in the choice of the land on which the experiment is to be made, and still more of the men who are to make it. This is the lesson we draw from the very interesting letter we print in another column. Mr. Impey relates the experience of one Thomas Bush, who owns five acres in Sturton, in Lincolnshire, —a remarkable parish, as there are 167 holdings of less than 100 acres, and 76 occupiers own the land they till. But when Mr. Impey asks us to take Thomas Bush as a fair sample of the men who own five-acre farms, we confess to having some difficulty in going along with him. Thomas Bush seems to us a very remarkable instance of strength of purpose. Thirty years ago he was a labourer, with a wife and seven children, earning 12s. a week. He saw that work was scarce, and he thought that he should like some land of his own. Probably that is the feeling of every labourer in similar circumstances ; but how many of them take the steps to get land which Thomas Bush took f Out of 12s. a week wages—eked out, we may suppose, by the labour of his wife and the elder children
—he contrived to save about a year. When he had got together £100 in this way, he bought five acres of land for X355. But he did not at once set up as a proprietor, tilling his own land. He kept one and a half acres to cultivate in odd hours, and let the remainder. This left him time to work on the railway, where wages were higher, and where he could consequently save more. When he had laid by £130 more, he spent it in building a house, and then took all the five acres into his own hand. Since then he has made enough to pay off the £255 borrowed on mortgage, though he has preferred to lay out the money in the purchase of more land. If a peasant- proprietary were made up of men like this, no one need fear for its success. Thomas Bush would have got on in any trade. He merely applied, first to buying land and then to cultivating it, qualities which would equally have given him anything else in reason that he might have wanted. It is to be noted, too, that though it is not likely that the seventy-six men who own the land they till in Sturton are all of this exceptional type, yet they have all been selected by a process which ensures some approach to these qualities. They have bought their holdings, and this implies that they must have saved part of the purchase-money and have been able to raise the rest on mortgage. Men who have the resolution and the character which enables them to do this are not likely to buy land rashly. They observe what the soil will yield, and calculate the profits it will return them. In this way both the conditions just now laid down are realised, and the experi- ment is tried in the right place and by the right men. When Mr. Chamberlain talks of peasant-proprietors, he is not thinking of labourers who have saved the money with which to buy
their holdings. At least, if he is, the machinery by which he .proposes to create them is very muoh in excess of what is needed. All that is wanted to stimulate purchase is to make land universally and readily saleable. When the aid of the municipalities is invoked, first to buy estates en bloc, and afterwards to help the labourers to repurchase them piece- meal, it is plain that some other process than saving is in view.
But to preach caution in starting peasant-proprietorship, is not to imply any doubt that, if started wisely, to own the land as well as till it would in many cases involve a real advance on merely tilling it. We recommend any one who doubts this to study the letter of Mr. W. H. Hall in the Times of Tuesday. His evidence does not so much contradict that of Lady Verney, as suggest other elements which ought to be taken account of before acquiescing in the condemnation which she pronounces on small holdings. He admits that the properties of the French peasants are often heavily mortgaged, that their lives are hard, and that their homes are unlovely. But they are their own masters, and their homes are their own ; and Mr. Hall justly holds these to be points of first-rate importance. More- over, in spite of immense subdivision on the worst possible principle, " the French peasants contrive to flood our markets with eggs, butter, fruit, and vegetables, and to get on without poor relief." But then they are helped by their hereditary skill, and by an excellent soil and climate. " Were all England to be cut up into ribands like France, and given to our labourers to cultivate, with their unskilfulness and ignorance of varying their crops, the thing could not go on for a month." The true solution is not a revolutionary transfer of land from one class to another, but the creation everywhere, by the side of the large farms, of " a certain number of small holdings to be within the reach of labourers, to excite them to thrift, and to hold out to them the chance of rising into the farmer class— not the gentleman farmer, but the hard-working, half farmer, half labourer." That is Mr. Hall's solution of the problem, and we feel sure that it will prove to be the correct one.
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