146 LANDLOEDS A NATURAL GROWTH 



vast centres of manufacturing industry. Abroad popula- 

 tion remained stationary ; the habits of the people con- 

 tinued to be agricultural ; manufacturing classes were 

 comparatively unknown. Consequently, on the Continent, 

 farming retained its self-sufficing character, and the agra- 

 rian communities, which belonged to primitive conditions 

 of society, outlived the decay of feudalism. 



In England the security, if not the profit, of the invest- 

 ment, together with the social and political advantages 

 which once attached to the possession of land, stimulated 

 capitalists to lay field to field, and those yeomen who still 

 owned the soil either consulted their pecuniary interests 

 by selling their estates, or were . compelled by the wide- 

 spread ruin of the first half of the present century to relax 

 their hold upon the land. The result is that the whole 

 number of landowners, properly so called, in England and 

 Wales scarcely exceeds at the present time 170,000 per- 

 sons. No one contends that such a condition of things 

 is sound or healthy. But the difficulty of resisting the 

 natural tendency to accumulate land is forcibly illustrated 

 by the report of a Land Commission recently published in 

 the United States. Statistics show that, in a country 

 where estates in fee tail are obsolete or abolished by law, 

 where there is no feudal tenure, no primogeniture, no 

 privileged class — in a country, finally, where the transfer 

 of land is simple, easy, and cheap— large estates and large 

 farms have become the rule. The United States contain 

 more tenant farmers than any other country in the world, 

 and, where this class exists, those who do the drudgery do 

 not own the land. Land monopoly is becoming the system 

 of America. 



The course of agricultural history in England has on 

 the w-hole been governed by natural economic laws ; its 



