150 Large and Small Holdings 



Government changes ; and although the permanent Civil Service of 

 England is not supposed to represent any particular political party, 

 it is unavoidable that its private opinions should to some extent 

 influence its administrative functions, so that the line of action 

 adopted receives a distinct political bias where personal initiative 

 is required, or where personal influence comes into question. A 

 Minister cannot get away from the influence of his politically opposed 

 subordinates, unless he is a man of quite unusual energy and capacity. 



Here again, therefore, political considerations make themselves 

 felt in regard to a purely economic question. And unfortunately it 

 seems as if the Liberal reform had rendered the political friction in 

 the small holdings movement more acute than before. For the 

 Conservative Party continues to hold fast by the ideal of the peasant 

 proprietor 1 , and defends its ideal nominally on economic grounds, 

 whereas in reality it is determined by the dislike of landlords for 

 compulsory hiring, the " three Fs," and limitations upon the rights of 

 property. The consequence is that the small holdings question is 

 increasingly side-tracked out of its proper lines of economic discussion, 

 to become the plaything of political programmes. "The small holdings 

 problem," as Mrs Wilkins writes 2 , "has been dragged into the arena of 

 party politics ; the battle is raging round the questions of ownership 

 and tenancy." However the struggle may end, its mere existence 

 must be fatal to the chances of any well-considered policy of home 

 colonisation. 



State action, however, as has already been indicated, has by no 

 means been the only method by which the multiplication of small 

 holdings has been attempted. Along with State action has gone a 

 great deal of effort in the same direction set in motion by private 

 initiative. All such effort has depended more or less upon the 

 co-operative principle. Agricultural co-operative associations were 

 to be called into existence for the purpose of acquiring and cutting 

 up properties. Of these, the associations formed by Mr R. Winfrey 

 are perhaps the best examples. Mr Winfrey first founded a Small 

 Holdings Syndicate 3 in the neighbourhood of Spalding in Lincoln- 



1 A Small Ownership Committee has been formed under the presidency of Sir Gilbert 

 Parker, M.P., to which very prominent Conservatives belong, its object being to further 

 the creation of small properties. As the best defence of this point of view the reader should 

 consult Sir Gilbert Parker's book, The Land for the People, with a preface by the Rt. Hon. 

 A. J. Balfour, M.P., 1909. 



2 Mrs Wilkins (Miss L. Jebb), The Small Holdings Controversy, 1909. Mrs Wilkins 

 here expounds clearly and instructively England's need of a class of tenant farmers. 



3 Report of the Co-operative Alliance Congress, 1902, pp. 343, 3+5, 349. 



