238 PEASANT PROPRIETARY ABROAD 



counterpart of so many pieces of tape laid side by side, 

 the length being out of all proportion to the breadth. 

 The general effect, as regards many parts of Holland, 

 may be judged from a reproduction, given in the 

 appendix to the present work, of a plan of the commune 

 of Vledder (Drenthe). The average dimensions of one 

 of the strips in the group at the top of this plan would 

 be 380 yards by 14 yards. In one instance there is a 

 length of 428 yards to a breadth of 4 yards. At the 

 bottom of the plan I have marked one especially long 

 and narrow strip with ' x '. Here the dimensions give 

 a length of 1,275 yards, and a breadth of 22 yards. 



Each farmer or cultivator naturally requires a number 

 of such patches as these in order to obtain land enough 

 for the support of himself and family, and, as the most 

 enterprising and successful advance, they try to secure 

 still more. But it rarely happens that they can buy or 

 rent fresh land immediately adjoining their own, and 

 they have to be content with such other pieces as may 

 be available wherever they can be got. Here, again, 

 the plan I give will show how the * holding ' of an 

 individual farmer in Holland may really be made up of 

 isolated scraps and strips of land all over the commune. 

 Nor does the plan in any way exaggerate the situation, 

 for in a leading Dutch paper, which has recently 

 published a series of articles on the subject, reference is 

 made to a farmer whose holding of close on 90 acres 

 consists of no fewer than seventy-eight parcels of land 

 in different parts of the commune in which he lives ! 



The results of such a system as this are bad for the 

 people, bad for agriculture, and bad for a country where 

 land is so scarce. There is much loss of time in going 

 from one strip of land to another ; there is an enormous 

 increase in the toil involved in cultivation; there is little 

 or no chance of using labour-saving appliances ; there is 



