142 Large and Small Holdings 



by the possibility that he may lose, over some part of his property, 

 what have hitherto been the most important of his functions as 

 a landowner. The rent to be paid for the land may be authoritatively 

 prescribed for him, if the County Council should see fit to hire it by 

 compulsion. The duration of the lease will also be dictated to him. 

 Improvements made by the occupier without his consent must, if 

 they increase the value of the land, be paid for by him at the 

 conclusion of the lease. Very little is left of his rights of property, 

 and it is quite comprehensible that a Party which represented his 

 interests should have objected more strongly to such an attack on 

 those rights than to the proposal to compel the sale of a few hundred 

 acres at a reasonable price. 



The powers of the County Councils were still further extended 

 by the Act of 1907 to enable them to support co-operative associa- 

 tions which may aim at the creation of small holdings or at assisting 

 their occupiers by means of credit, co-operative purchase or co- 

 operative marketing of goods. The Councils may even call such 

 Associations into existence and use them as their " agents " (section 

 39 (i 4)). This provision opens the way to a combination of official 

 action with voluntary effort which may prove of the greatest benefit. 

 Co-operative purchase of land and the foundation of a sort of colony 

 of small holders by co-operative means (not, of course, cultivation on 

 a co-operative basis) may have excellent results. This has been 

 proved by the various Small Holdings Associations, especially those 

 of Norfolk and Lincolnshire, which have done remarkably well in 

 the creation of prosperous little farms. In fact, the results of such 

 co-operative undertakings have tended to produce an opinion that 

 the official attempts were often fore-doomed to failure precisely 

 because a County Council cannot proceed in the same eminently 

 sensible manner as a private association. The division of the land, 

 the erection of buildings, the fencing, drainage work and so forth 

 are all certainly effected more cheaply by private effort than by 

 a local authority. From this point of view the well-known agricultural 

 author, Mr Edwin A. Pratt, is right in commending the co-operative 

 creation of small holdings as against State action 1 . But before the 

 co-operative association can act it must be able to acquire the 

 necessary land, and that under conditions such as to make the forma- 

 tion of small holdings possible. How dark the outlook was in that 

 direction was shown by the evidence given to the Committee of 

 1905-6 by Mr Winfrey, himself the President of two such Associa- 



1 E. A. Pratt, The Transition in Agriculture, 1906, pp. 260 f. 



