144 Large and Small Holdings 



radical and incisive action on the part of the authorities was necessary 

 if any solution of the question of the unit of holding were to contribute 

 to agrarian reform generally. 



It was necessary in the first place that there should be some 

 central authority in a position to take over the powers of recalcitrant 

 local authorities, and so to ensure a better execution of the law than 

 had so far obtained. But in the second place the introduction of 

 a really new principle was required. It had become evident that 

 mere permission to the County Councils to acquire land was quite 

 ineffective in cases where land monopoly and the resisting-power of 

 the great landowners prevented an agreement. Power of expropria- 

 tion had become absolutely inevitable. Even this important reform 

 did not suffice to solve the difficulties arising as between the problem 

 of the ownership of land and the problem of the unit of holding. 

 Compulsory purchase could indeed make the acquisition of the 

 necessary soil possible. But the market price of land in England 

 being so much above its capitalised agricultural value, and this price 

 being still further enhanced by the cost of expropriation, it remained 

 doubtful whether the land so acquired could be made to pay in the 

 form of small properties. Compulsory purchase could not abolish the 

 fact that it was often necessary to pay for qualities of the land which 

 were of value to a wealthy landowner, but not to a small cultivator. 

 Hence the third and most important change in the law, the change 

 which more than either of the others expressed the demand for 

 a change in existing conditions as a measure of social reform ; in 

 view of the difficulties created by land prices and landownership as 

 they stood, the hope of creating a class which should in the main be 

 a class of peasant proprietors was given up, and compulsory hiring 

 was instituted, with the intention of bringing the creation of small 

 tenant-farmers into the foreground. 



If under modern conditions the large farm had remained the most 

 profitable unit of holding, no one would have attempted to limit the 

 right of landowners to the free disposal of their land. For, as 

 Mr G. C. Brodrick remarked as early as 1881, "it is a trite saying 

 that large farms always go with large properties 1 ." The law of 

 compulsory hiring expresses the fact that the form of landownership 

 created by historical conditions and now existing in England does 

 not correspond to the needs of modern agriculture so far as the unit 

 of holding is concerned : that is to say, that large properties and 

 small holdings cannot go "hand in hand." The recent legislation 



1 Brodrick, op. cit. p. 393. 



