SMALL HOLDINGS. 341 



or quasi-co-operative — as well as Joint Stock companies, 

 have come into the field. There are several societies in 

 the eastern provinces professing exceedingly altruistic 

 objects, but working, as is generally known, for the crowding 

 out of Polish husbandmen by Germans.^ But there are 

 also some genuinely humanitarian societies, which take a 

 moderate profit, but provide equitably for their settlers. 

 The largest of these bodies — whose programme is similar 

 to what is known among ourselves as " philanthropy- 

 cum-five-per-cent." — is the Joint Stock company Die 

 Landhank, of Berlin, which works with ;£2, 000,000 of money, 

 half raised by shares, the other half by debentures.^ The 

 real profit-yielding business of this company consists in 

 the buying up of neglected estates and improving them 

 thoroughly, after which they will resell bodily, as undivided 

 properties, at a considerable advance, having been made 

 worth so much more. But at the same time the company 

 also cuts up properties suitable for the purpose into small 

 holdings and disposes of them at a moderate profit to small 

 folk under the surveillance of the " Commission " already 

 mentioned, whose help in respect of land bonds is of course 

 in all such cases resorted to as far as is practicable, on 

 the ground of the advantageousness of its terms. 



Naturally it could not be suggested that in shaping our 

 own Small Holdings policy we should at all points follow 

 the Prussian precedent. Our adoption, for instance, of 

 one main point, that is, the vendor being expected to find 

 the purchasers and propose a " plan," does not appear 

 altogether to fall in with our accustomed usages. On this 

 point, however, we might to some extent learn a lesson from 

 Italy, Serbia and Roumania. There it is not the vendor 

 who seeks out the purchasers and marshals them in the 

 formation of the " plan " — indeed operations take the 

 shape there of renting, not buying, according to the estab- 



^ Some of these, I am sorry to say, have recently been " cracked 

 up " in the British review Press, on the strength of their professions. 



^ I have given particulars of the working of this scheme in an 

 article which appeared in the Ecovomic Review of April, 1912 : 

 " Small Holdings and Land Banks." 



