346 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



— appears to have passed altogether unheeded, but by 

 ^\^hich Prussian authorities, after considerable experience, 

 set the greatest possible store. The question to be dealt 

 with is not merely one of finance and credit. In this country 

 we talk of small holdings settlers, as if any one could be 

 planted upon practically any land and be expected to make 

 a good living out of his settling. Indeed, in speaking of 

 settling discharged soldiers on the land, we talk as if we 

 were giving away something that must necessarily spell 

 a living. Prussian authorities have not in their first care- 

 lessness gone quite that length of optimism. But they 

 have been careless, and found that it will not pay. Since 

 a considerable time already they will not accept a settler 

 who cannot provide prima-facie evidence of his fitness for 

 his new occupation. At the outset village schoolmasters 

 were readily accepted as presumably well acquainted with 

 country ways and in a fit condition to take to agriculture. 

 However, on trial they failed and have accordingly as a 

 class been placed upon the Index. Genuine town folk 

 the Commissions will likewise not have. But they are 

 glad to take country folk returning to rural pursuits after 

 a period of town life. Their favourites are rural labourers 

 and sons of peasants, that is, what we should term small 

 yeomen. Such eclecticism is perfectly fair and called for. 

 The Commissions are directed to see that the holding is 

 so constituted as to promise to a fit working cultivator and 

 his family a fair subsistence. Having employed their 

 influence and the State's credit for that purpose, it is no 

 more than proper that they should make sure that the 

 human factor employed in the task is likewise fit and suit- 

 able. Selection of suitable men is the secret of Mr. Prothero's 

 success in the Maulden experiment, in which purchasers were 

 accepted who paid actually nothing down, but men also 

 who, it was known, could be trusted for fitness and for 

 honesty. 



In the third place it is a governing point in the Prussian 

 system that the State should, as already observed, intervene 

 in the matter by careful supervision, charging itself with 

 all the clerical and technical work required, but not — save 



