336 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND. 



opinion, is an important, practical, and eesthetic 

 consideration. Nothing handicaps a small 

 holder so much at the start as to find, after he 

 has become possessed of his land and cottage, 

 that before he buys stock he has to expend a 

 good deal of his small capital in the making of 

 poultry -houses, pigsties, possibly a cowshed, 

 stockyard, a dairy, or a fruit room and granary. 

 Then there is the assthetic consideration of 

 the man in the street, who goes out into 

 the heart of rural England for a holiday only 

 to find beautiful sequestered spots disfigured 

 by squalid sheds, with tarred felt roofs hanging 

 on, as it were, by their eyebrows. 



The county council might very well 

 follow the excellent example of the Crown 

 Lands Commissioners in the way in which they 

 built the substantial homesteads in the fenlands 

 of the Wash, erecting every outhouse con- 

 ceivably necessary for the live-stock of a small 

 holding. 



Furthermore, by building substantial farm 

 buildings, well planned, in central sites, county 

 councils could at the start encourage co- 

 operation as well as economise in the erection 

 of farm buildings that could be used in 

 common by a group of small holders. 



