Home Colonisation 215 



It is therefore clear that the home colonisation of England cannot be 

 brought about on the same basis as if the colonists could be drawn from 

 an existing peasantry. If in Germany the settler has the sense that he is 

 carrying on a tradition, and maintaining the social standard of his fore- 

 fathers, in England quite other motives lead a man to take up a small 

 holding. 



(1) England has an agricultural proletariat, a class of landless agri- 

 cultural labourers, who may be brought out of their dependent position 

 and established as small cultivators. This class has for over a century been 

 produced as a necessary part of the large farm system ; while for some thirty 

 years past the revival of small holdings has made it possible for its members 

 to rise to an independent position. In their case there is therefore no 

 question of the maintenance of a hereditary tradition ; on the contrary, when 

 an agricultural labourer takes a small holding he climbs into a social position 

 which is as a. matter of history altogether new to his class. Moreover, not 

 only the social position, but also the whole economic position, is new to him. 

 He will have worked all his life as a wage-earner on large or medium-sized 

 farms, probably devoted to arable in the first place, worked in conjunction 

 with stock-feeding based on large pastures and hay-fields : whereas on his small 

 holding he will have to adopt branches of production which demand quite 

 a different kind of labour, where machinery is at a discount, and the work 

 must be done by hand in great detail and up to a very high standard of 

 quality. Economic difficulties such as these can only be overcome by that 

 peculiar zest for work produced by the hope of making so great a rise in the 

 social scale. That this desire for independence does exist is proved by the 

 fact that in the year 1909, for example, 25 per cent, of the applications for 

 small holdings came from agricultural labourers. 



(2) The second category of possible colonists and it is a very miscel- 

 laneous one consists of applicants who have not hitherto been in any way 

 occupied in agriculture. They would, so far as their previous economic 

 activity is concerned, be classed as town-dwellers, or at any rate as industrial 

 workers ; but from their very various callings they desire to pass to the land. 

 In this class, though not the most important part of it, are the village artisans 

 and their congeners butchers, bakers, grocers or small shopkeepers. To 

 many of these, the Small Holdings Act is a means of obtaining land as a 

 by-employment 1 . Their shop will remain the backbone of their economy. 

 But others give up their industrial employment and devote themselves 

 entirely to farming. Two examples of what men of this class have achieved 

 are here appended, taken from the evidence given before the Committee 

 of 



1 Cp. Report of a Conference as to the Administration of the Small Holdings Acts, 

 1908, p. 35. 



8 See Small Holdings Report, 1906. Minutes, qu. 2217. 



