AUTHORITIES EXPERIMENTS 395 



correlated with those of the Local Authorities. 

 Here, again, I would quote from Sir Francis Chan- 

 ning's supplementary report : 



* The Report suggests that competent local advisers 

 may volunteer to help the Central Authority in 

 selecting the men and supervising the management 

 of the land. But I submit that these questions of 

 local administration need more precise handling ; 

 and, with a large increase of small holdings, the 

 work of supervision and management will be 

 immensely increased. 



* Some effective machinery for local supervision 

 and management, fully representing local require- 

 ments, and with an exact grasp of local conditions, 

 is, in my opinion, essential to sound working. This 

 will in many cases be best done by the Local 

 Authority ; in other cases by co-operative societies.' 



The Committee do not define precisely what 

 they mean by the * definite experiments' which the 

 proposed Central Authority is to undertake. It is 

 maintained by those who have studied the small- 

 holding system as it exists in England to-day that, 

 given proper conditions, small holdings need not be 

 experimented about ; they are a proved success, 

 and where they have apparently failed it is often 

 due to the fact that the economic causes affecting 

 them have not had free play. The natural supply 

 to the existing demand is in so many cases withheld 

 by the working of our land laws and customs, that, 

 while these laws and customs survive, we must 

 have recourse to counter-legislation to supply the 



