ioo Large and Small Holdings 



so that the statistics confirm at least in some points what has been 

 noted above as to the characteristics of the modern movement. 



In a relatively short time the large farm system has thus retro- 

 graded considerably, and medium and small farms have made 

 corresponding progress. The progress would have been more rapid 

 but for certain causes, some of them economic and some not, to be 

 considered below. But such as it was it appeared to many people as 

 an altogether unprecedented phenomenon, especially to those who 

 were not acquainted with the agricultural history of England, and 

 supposed that the preponderance of large farms was inherited from 

 time immemorial. To the historian the change is of course merely 

 a reversion to the system of holdings which obtained up till the 

 middle of the eighteenth century, and was destroyed only by the 

 great development of arable farming. 



