SMALL HOLDINGS. 333 



In practically all countries of the civilised Continent a 

 deliberate policy of furthering the formation of Small 

 Holdings, and multiplying such as much as is possible, 

 is now being followed. To such policy, as to more others 

 besides, it was Germany, and in Germany specifically Prussia, 

 which by its methodical treatment of the matter gave the 

 first impulse. It may accordingly not be altogether amiss 

 at this point briefly to review what has within the last 

 thirty years been accomplished in Prussia, under a very 

 methodically pursued policy of home colonisation, which 

 since 1893 I have had under continued observation, paying 

 repeated visits for the purpose to the operating centres 

 and to the settlements. For, although of course in the 

 two countries to be compared conditions differ materially, 

 nevertheless what has been done abroad may teach us 

 something. 



The policy was begun on lines that we can do no other 

 than heartily abominate, namely, a deliberate plan to 

 depolonise Polish districts — inhabited, by the way, by 

 very able cultivators, whom one of the official German 

 colonisers, the late President Beutner, frankly declared to 

 me that economically he preferred to Germans. The scheme 

 was : with State money to buy up estates of large Polish 

 landowners and settle them with German peasantry. 

 That scheme has cost the State an enormous sum of money 

 and proved, from the Government's political point of view, 

 a dead failure. For the estates bought up were for the 

 most part encumbered property, belonging to embarrassed 

 owners, who were not sorry to sell, especially as the price 

 which had to be offered was good — not a few of them with 

 a view to setting up afresh on less encumbered lines else- 

 where. The State being the directly operating party, buying 

 up with its own cash — as Mr, Jesse Collings in his scheme 

 proposed that the State should do among ourselves — could 

 not — as the President of the Prussian Colonising Commission 

 of the time, the late Herr von Wittenburg, explained to 

 me — do otherwise than offer handsome prices as well as 

 pay for everything else connected with the matter " through 

 the nose." The newly created holdings proved comfortable 



