PREFACE 



THE German edition of this book appeared in I9O4 1 . When the 

 Cambridge University Press decided to publish the present 

 translation I realised that it would be necessary to add a considerable 

 amount of supplementary matter. In the historical part of the book 

 it was desirable to notice the publications of the six intervening years 

 on the question of the decay of the yeomanry, although they have 

 not altered my views as to the causes of the disappearance of that 

 class. But above all it was necessary to take the Small Holdings 

 Act of 1908 into consideration. I therefore went to England in the 

 summer of 1910 in order to study its working on the spot, so far as it 

 has gone at present. The statistics have been brought up to 1909 so 

 far as was possible. The appendix on " The Modern Small Holder " 

 did not appear in the German edition. It is an attempt briefly to 

 outline some new impressions received as to the psychological aspects 

 of the small holdings question. My personal study of the question was 

 of course mainly made in the course of 1903, when I spent six months 

 touring rural England with this end in view. It is a pleasant duty to 

 offer my warm thanks here to all those who so kindly helped me with 

 information. It is not possible to name them all, for if they were 

 numerous in 1903, they were still more numerous in 1910. But it was 

 a pleasure to find when I came back to England in 1910 that no one 

 had forgotten me, and I am proud to have had personal experience 

 of the English loyalty so well known in Germany. It was sad to 

 miss my old and valued friend Arthur Wilson-Fox, C.B., so early and 



1 It was published under the title Entstehung und Ruckgang des landwirtschaftlickc* 

 Grossbetriebs in England, by Julius Springer, Berlin. I owe my thanks to Messrs Springer 

 for giving their consent to the translation. 



