I2O Large and Small Holdings 



depends on the will of the landlord to form small farms or not to form 

 them. Their economic interest, in the present day, often demands 

 that they should form them. The reason why they frequently 

 nevertheless fail to do so is partly to be sought in the high initial 

 expenditure required for the erection of farmhouses and outbuildings, 

 the provision of a water-supply, and so forth. They are afraid of 

 such an experiment. Often they hesitate to borrow the necessary 

 capital ; or if they have it themselves, some other investment seems 

 safer or more profitable. But still, so far as the hindrances to the 

 division of large farms lie in purely economic considerations such as 

 these, they might be regarded as not insuperable. If many landlords 

 had the experience of Lord Harrowby, who had five and twenty offers 

 for a holding of 23 acres, while for one of 1000 acres he could not find 

 a single purchaser, enlightened self-interest might be trusted to bring 

 them to the conclusion that they must surely if slowly cut up their 

 estates into small holdings unless they wish to see them vastly 

 diminished in value 1 . Probably such economic considerations would 

 already have led to a much more rapid development of small holdings 

 if other non-economic motives had not counteracted their effect. But 

 here again it has to be remembered that to the English landowner the 

 soil is not simply an instrument of production, out of which he seeks 

 to obtain the highest returns possible ; its value to him is very largely 

 in the social, political and sporting amenities which it offers. Small 

 holdings, however, are much less favourable than large to sport and 

 hunting. Lord Harrowby did indeed attempt to explain the antipathy 

 of landlords to the development of small holdings purely on the ground 

 of the expenditure involved, and laid before the Committee of 1906 

 calculations intended to prove this. But an incidental remark in his 

 evidence speaks more eloquently than those hypothetical figures. 

 " I think if you have a house with shooting it is a disadvantage to 

 have a lot of little holdings all about the place there is trespass and 

 all that." He himself at that time reared, he said, 5000 pheasants on 

 , his estates 8 . In many neighbourhoods the landlord is an opponent 

 \ of small holdings for the reason that they demand the transformation 

 j of arable into pasture, which is bad for partridge shooting. In Norfolk 

 large districts were for some time let at an almost nominal rent, 

 although some of the land was well suited for fruit and vegetable 

 culture, and therefore for the formation of small holdings 8 . Nor is 



1 Small Holdings Report, 1906, qu. 2387 and qu. 2439. 

 J Ibid., qu. 1450. Cp. also qu. 2458, 2460. 

 \ * J. Simpson, in The County Gentleman's Estate Book, 1903, p. 114. 



