HOW TO SETTLE 203 



possession of the question, and we have had a hot fight over the 

 point of ownership or tenancy, in which, for the time, the advocates 

 of tenancy still hold the field — not, however, turning their victory 

 to over-good account, since evidently in the persons of county 

 councillors the chase is being made, as the Latin proverb has it, 

 " with unwilling hounds." 



In Germany — which, under this particular aspect, is practically 

 the only country to place in comparison with our own — the mini- 

 mum of purchase price to be provided otherwise than by advance 

 from the State (in the shape of land bonds), and therefore assumed 

 to be paid by the purchaser, still stands officially at 25 per cent. 

 But that 25 per cent. — as affecting ourselves — has to be taken 

 " with a grain of salt." For in the hands of the intending settlers 

 — being to a large extent sons of rather substantial yeomen — money 

 is more plentiful than in those of our " agricultural labourers " and 

 " discharged soldiers." Even labourers and farm servants in Ger- 

 many manage to lay by what will go some way towards the pur- 

 chase of a holding. And for working funds they have, as has already 

 been shown, co-operative credit to help them. The purchaser here 

 coming into account also has, under a quite peculiar arrangement, 

 favoured by the presence of a specifically Prussian institution, 

 rendering admirable service — for the existence of which that country 

 has its great statesmen of the Napoleonic era, Stein and Harden- 

 berg, to thank — to assist him. That institution is the Rentenbank, 

 which, on the proposed sale and purchase being judged by a special 

 tribunal to be in the public interest and a promising proposition, 

 provides three-fourths of the purchase price agreed upon at a low 

 rate of interest, to be repaid in cash by terminable annuities spread 

 over a period of somewhere about sixty years, varying according to 

 the rate of interest selected, in the shape of land bonds guaranteed 

 by the State. Up to the time of the war certainly those land 

 bonds maintained their position on the market fairly well, so that 

 they were gladly taken by vendors in consideration of the sale so 

 effected securing to them certain advantages, all the legal, survey- 

 ing, etc., business in the transaction being carried out by the 

 authorities of the State at a purely nominal charge. 



The authorities to whom the judgment on the advisability of the 

 proposed sale was committed are the " General Commissions," 

 which are Government institutions, holding a purely economic brief, 

 free from all political bias — as may be judged by the fact that while 

 the political government of the monarchy was spending colossal 

 sums of money and straining every nerve by the exercise of com- 



