70 Large and Small Holdings 



Marshall, Sinclair, Low, etc. ; and of the Germans who followed them, 

 in particular Albrecht Thaer and Karl Marx. 



Arthur Young wrote whole treatises on the question with a 

 particular end in view. The rise of the large farm system and the 

 social evils which followed in its train had awakened the indignation 

 of the people at large and of the representatives of the consumers' 

 interests. The whole development was attacked as a social evil. 

 Young felt himself called to defend it as an economic good. He was 

 the great eighteenth century representative of the interests of the 

 agricultural producer. Now the large farm was undoubtedly the form 

 of holding best suited to the then flourishing business of corn-grow- 

 ing. Young proved, and could prove, no more than that. His very 

 method of classifying holdings, according to the number of ploughs 

 employed 1 , shows that his conception was limited to arable-farming. 

 So far as this was concerned, he was able to show by arguments 

 which are still valid that greater profits could be made on the large 

 farm than on the small. But he did not stop there. What he had 

 proved as regarded arable he extended to cover agriculture in general. 

 He even formulated an exact size of holding as absolutely best, 

 namely 1400 acres 2 . Because he saw that the improved methods of 

 arable farming had been best applied on large holdings, he fallaciously 

 concluded that the large farm system had brought about those im- 

 provements. He overlooked the fact that they all had reference in 

 the first place to the production of corn, whether the particular 

 improvement in view was the drainage of wet lands, the use of 

 machinery, or the breaking-up of bad pasture ; that the increasing 

 profitableness of corn-growing had first made such improvements 

 worth while ; and that the same profitableness of corn had led to the 

 formation of the large farms, because on such farms both the particular 

 improvements in view and the methods appropriate to corn-growing 

 in general could produce the best results. So that it was not the 

 large farms which made corn-growing pay, but on the contrary the 

 rising price of corn which made the large farm pay. Young was 

 quite right when, comparing large and small arable holdings, he con- 

 cluded that the former unit was the more profitable. It was more 

 economical in the use of horses and ploughs, and it had the advan- 

 tage in the separation of management from manual labour, in the 

 greater education possessed by the large farmer, and in his larger 

 capital, which enabled him to introduce the new methods at a low 



1 Rural Economy, p. 12. 



a Ibid., p. 45 ; and so also W. Marshall, On the Landed Property of England, 1804, P- H4- 



