SMALL-HOLDING OWNERSHIP 223 



the villages to the cities, or failing these to America 

 or elsewhere. Quite a few of them remain where 

 they were bred if by any means they can depart. 



Why should they ? The life of an agricultural 

 labourer is not particularly attractive except as a 

 means to an end, and for most of them that end is 

 exceedingly remote. Here and there a man who 

 has saved a little money may be set up in a holding 

 under the County Council (in my own neighbourhood 

 I do not know of one), but nine out of ten labourers, 

 as distinguished from small, retired tradesfolk, &c, 

 are doomed to end their lives exactly where they 

 began. Indeed their best days of manhood are their 

 earliest, for as time goes on and their strength lessens, 

 so must their wages. Moreover, comparatively few of 

 them would take up a small-holding on average land, 

 even if it were offered to them. Why ? Because they 

 fear that they could not make it pay, and they are 

 right. 



Except in picked situations or where there are 

 sundry advantages that I have no space to detail, if 

 their occupiers do no outside work and lack private 

 means, small-holdings on ordinary land will not pay in 

 England, unless and until a really far-reaching system 

 of co-operation, such as prevails in Denmark, shall 

 be established in this country. If only politicians and 

 others would bear that fact in mind it would save much 

 disappointment and disillusion. I will go further and 

 add, for reasons I have given already, that I do not 

 believe this vital co-operation will ever be established 

 in Great Britain until the land is in many more 

 hands than hold it at present. The tenant is not a 

 co-operator. When did the Irish peasants begin to 

 co-operate? Was it not after they had bought their 



