324 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



Farmers as a class are decidedly opposed to the innova- 

 tion. No " Othello " yet has been content to see " his 

 occupation gone." But farmers apprehended worse. They 

 were honestly afraid that the best pieces, what is called 

 " the heart," would be cut out of their holdings, in order 

 that it might be given to the new public favourite, about 

 whose capacity to work the land they quite naturally 

 had their doubts. Using " wood," as the French proverb 

 has it, of all sorts for manufacturing darts to shoot at the 

 new foe, they proclaimed — even before the war drove the 

 fancy for wheat growing up to fever point — that wheat 

 was what we mainly want in our agriculture, and that 

 small holders could not possibly compete with large ones 

 in the production of wheat. The experience of France 

 and Germany, both of them countries pre-eminently of 

 small holdings, but the only ones among countries possess- 

 ing a considerable industrial development which have 

 reached a point very near that ideal one of producing all 

 the bread corn required for their population within their 

 own borders, and one of which boasts a distinctly better 

 average yield of corn per acre than ourselves, does not 

 appear altogether to bear this out. I myself have seen in 

 Germany peasants' corn, the heavier yield of which was 

 expressly accounted for by the fact that it was peasants'. 



However, that was a minor point, which it is needless to 

 contest. In any case farmers were hostile. So here was 

 a decided obstacle in the way. 



In the next place we cannot be said to have been parti- 

 cularly happy in the choice of our machinery for creating 

 small holdings. In this respect we have a lesson to learn 

 from our present enemy, Prussia. She has managed her 

 own home colonisation on decidedly better lines. We 

 have committed the task of the creation of small holdings 

 in the main to bodies upon which the opponents of such 

 policy are strongly represented, and the class of the intended 

 beneficiaries are not — to bodies, also, which have many 

 other things to occupy their attention. Some of these 

 bodies, no doubt, recognising the national interest involved, 

 have buckled to their task in good earnest. However, they 



