32 THE "BACK TO THE LAND" MOVEMENT 



farms, contended one side; not so, replied the other side. One 

 British writer, a friend of the small farm owner, stated the matter 

 concretely as follows: "Our agricultural writers tell us, indeed, 

 that laborers in agriculture are much better off as farm servants 

 than they would be as small proprietors. We have only the mas- 

 ter's word for this. Ask the servant. The colonists told us the 

 same thing of their slaves. If property is a good and desirable 

 thing, I suspect the smallest quantity of it is good and desirable; 

 and that state of society in which it is most widely diffused is the 

 best constituted." 



Norway is cited as an example where peasant proprietors are 

 of oldest date and most numerous in proportion to population, 

 and where as a consequence social and economic conditions are 

 of the best. Concerning the effects of peasant proprietorship on 

 the continent, the same writer goes on to say: 1 



"If we listen to the large farmer, the scientific agriculturist, the political 

 economist, good farming must perish with large farms; the very idea that 

 good farming can exist unless on large farms cultivated with great capital, 

 they hold to be absurd. Draining, manuring, economical arrangement, clean- 

 ing the land, regular rotations, valuable stock and implements, all belong 

 exclusively to large farms, worked by large capital, and by hired labor. This 

 reads very well; but if we raise our eyes from their books to their fields, and 

 coolly compare what we see in the best districts farmed in large farms with 

 what we see in the best districts farmed in small farms, we see, and there is no 

 blinking the fact, better crops on the ground in Flanders, East Friesland, 

 Holstein, in short, on the whole line of the arable land of equal quality on the 

 continent from the Sound to Calais, than we see on the line of the British 

 coast opposite to this line, and in the same latitudes, from the Firth of Forth 

 all round to Dover. Minute labor on small portions of arable ground gives 

 evidently, in equal soils and climate, a superior productiveness, where these 

 small portions belong" in property, as in Flanders, Holland, Friesland, and 

 Ditmarsch in Holstein, to the farmer. It is not pretended by our agricultural 

 writers, that our large farmers, even in Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, or the 

 Lothians approach to the garden-like cultivation, attention to manures, 

 drainage, and clean state of the land, or in productiveness from a small space 

 of soil not originally rich, which distinguish the small farmers of Flanders, 

 or their system. In the best-farmed parish in Scotland or England, more land 

 is wasted in the corners and borders of the fields of large farms, in the roads 

 through them, unnecessarily wide because they are bad, and bad because they 

 are wide, in neglected commons, waste spots, useless belts and clumps of sorry 

 trees, and such unproductive areas, than would maintain the poor of the parish, 

 if they were all laid together and cultivated. But large capital applied to 

 farming is of course only applied to the very best soils of a country. It cannot 

 touch the small unproductive spots which require more time and labor to 

 fertilize them than is consistent with a quick return of capital. But although 

 hired time and labor cannot be applied beneficially to such cultivation, the 

 owner's time and labor may. He is working for no higher returns at first from 

 his land than a bare living. But in the course of generations fertility and value 

 are produced; a better living, and even very improved processes of husbandry, 



1 Laing, Notes of a Traveler, p. 299 et seq. 



