SHORTCOMINGS OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 39 



culture — and indeed all foreign Agriculture ; only its effect 

 is most marked in German — from ours is this, that the 

 leaders of the agricultural movement had not, like our own, 

 a country filled with latifundia to deal with — such as, 

 according to Pliny's account, perdidere Italiam et provincias 

 (proved the ruin of Italy and its provinces), and, according 

 to the same authority, led landowners to rely upon pas- 

 turage — but with one largely subdivided into holdings of 

 comparatively small, in some instances very small, size. 

 That has made a very decided difference in favour of German 

 prosperity. Students of German Agriculture must be 

 aware that it is not the districts of large landed possessions, 

 or at any rate large exploitations, which affix to that Agri- 

 culture the stamp of superiority, but the districts in which 

 land is divided and therefore receives more minute care 

 and more liberal feeding with fertilisers and dressings with 

 labour. The difference becomes all the more striking 

 when we observe that it was just in the time when Germany 

 went on subdividing and guarding carefully against re- 

 agglomeration that we, on our side, showed ourselves reso- 

 lutely bent upon laying field to field and — worse than that — 

 enclosing common after common — " stealing the common 

 from the goose." It was while Professor Seeley's hero 

 Stein and his colleague Hardenberg were overcoming great 

 obstacles in creating an independent peasant proprietary 

 — which work of theirs was zealously continued by their 

 successors in office, down to our days, and is still in progress 

 — that we were most active bringing in Enclosure Bills 

 which ousted the peasantry from their possessions. Ger- 

 many, as it happens, had not over-many of such precious 

 common lands — which have, in olden days, proved such a 

 support to our peasant population — except in the most 

 equivocal shape, that of common forests, which under good 

 management indeed prove a horn of plenty to communes, 

 but which also very easily fall into a state of mismanage- 

 ment, in which they are a loss to the community. Where 

 common lands exist in Germany in another form — mainly 

 in the South — they are valued and preserved. And Switzer- 

 land — the country par excellence of the Allmend, with its 



