HOW TO SETTLE 209 



electric power and light coming, under arrangements which make 

 them subdivisible into small supplies, as power is subdivided in 

 Sheffield workshops. In a collective settlement you may standardise 

 your produce raised, where opportunities are favourable, in sufficient 

 quantities though raised by different men, so as to command a 

 favoured price in the market, and obtain a reputation which means 

 a stable sale. A single man could not do that. So there are scores 

 of things more. It is the spirit which co-operation infuses, making 

 for progress and betterment, the enduring readiness for common 

 action, which place the smaller man on an equality with the large, 

 the collective doings which beget their own opportunities for fruitful 

 action, the common interest in things with its vivifying influence, 

 which mark off the co-operative settlement from both isolation and 

 unorganised clusters of people. 



Collective settlement has been more than once attempted in what 

 has become the ideal socialist way, namely, in the shape of actual 

 co-operative farming, as a common concern, carried on on common 

 account. That was done in Ralahine, in Brampton Bryan, in 

 Radbourne and in various settlements in the United States. And 

 to some extent we see it governing Lord Monteagle's one-year's 

 collective wheat growing at Foynes in a wisely contracted and reduced 

 shape. In England we have the two Assingtons, which represent 

 this idea — on a very reduced scale, the only scale on which, so far 

 as my knowledge goes, it has been found abidingly practicable. It 

 cannot be disputed that land may under favouring circumstances 

 be profitably cultivated for common account. I do not however 

 know of any instance of this occurring in our country except on the 

 minute scale mentioned. And in Germany and other continental 

 countries public land is designedly not cultivated directly by its 

 owners, or for their account as occupiers, but is by preference hired 

 out to large farmers as the more profitable way of utilising it. But 

 in Italy there are several public companies which find a very good 

 account in carrying on collective farming on a large scale, but 

 intensively. Two such are the Istituto di Fondi Rustici, of Rome — 

 which, working with a subscribed capital of 30,000,000 lire, now 

 owns upwards of 70,000 acres of land, all being cultivated for its 

 own account ; and (until quite recently, when the enterprise waa 

 given up) the Societd per la Bonijica dei Terrem Ferraresi, wind) 

 owned about 50,000 acres, out of which it appears to have been 

 netting a fair return. In a country where agriculture is generally 

 backward, and due justice is not by any means done to the cap i 

 bilities of the soil, to a great extent through timidity in the in\ 



B.B. P 



