260 TENANCY AND A CONNECTING LINK 



content with a smaller proportion of profit on his 

 produce, after meeting charges which are higher than 

 he ought, properly speaking, to be called upon to bear 

 if not higher than the land itself can bear. 



The whole position is commercially unsound ; but, 

 even if it were not, there would still remain the con- 

 sideration whether County Council management of 

 small holdings is a thing to be desired. In this 

 connection the fact is worth recalling that when, in 

 the year 1834, tne P or Law Commissioners stated in 

 their annual report that ' the immediate advantage of 

 allotments is so great that, if there were no other mode 

 of supplying them, we think it would be worth while, 

 as a temporary measure, to propose some general plan 

 for providing them,' they added : ' Where the system 

 is carried on by individuals it has been generally 

 beneficial ; but when managed by parish officers it has 

 seldom succeeded.' 



These views of seventy years ago are still applicable 

 to the general conditions to-day, especially considering 

 that local representatives and parish officers have a 

 multiplicity of duties to get through in the twentieth 

 century that was unknown in the early years of the 

 nineteenth. Even granting, too, for the sake of 

 argument, that County Council control might succeed, 

 there would still remain the question whether it would 

 be desirable that large colonies of peasant proprietors 

 should owe their creation to a popularly-elected body, 

 whose return they might be able to control, and whose 

 policy they might influence in their own favour, without 

 adequate regard for the interests of the general body of 

 the ratepayers, in whose name and at whose risk the 

 schemes in question would be put in operation. 



For these various reasons I am not disposed to look 

 either to the Small Holdings Act of 1892, with its 



