356 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



good to the Nation and which really are their due. Besides, 

 our present argument is in nowise opposed to tenancy, but 

 only in favour of giving an easy opening also to ownership. 

 And it deserves to be remarked that wherever land is freely 

 saleable, as it is in France and even more so, with the help 

 of a compulsory land register, in Germany, ownership is 

 by no means a bar to removal. Land which can be bought 

 freely will also sell freely. 



The close connection between agricultural prosperity 

 and occupying ownership, as testified in our own national 

 Agriculture during the period of agricultural revival at the 

 turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has already 

 been remarked upon. The occupying owners there concerned 

 were for the most part men of the yeoman class, therefore 

 not precisely " small holders " in our present acceptation 

 of the term. However, their well-being certainly argues 

 in favour of ownership. That ownership, generated by 

 the sunshine of prosperity, disappeared under the clouds 

 of quite exceptional depression. And by the time that 

 prosperity revived, after the Repeal of the Corn Laws, the 

 domination of capital had become so pronounced and capital- 

 ists showed themselves so keen upon the acquisition of 

 land for the sake of the social and political advantages 

 which its possession carried with it, that the economically 

 calculating agriculturist was practically kept out of the 

 running. He could not then keep up his competition with 

 the big purse which thought more of possession than of 

 income. Economic conditions of the present day, including 

 the dwindling of the agrements of possession of land, and the 

 gathering weight of taxation, bid fair to bring things back 

 to a proper balance. Meanwhile the movement in favour 

 of really small holdings ownership, a peasant proprietary, 

 has been gaining in force. And it may be worth repeating 

 that Joseph Arch's Union, the only fully representative 

 organisation of the class for whom such small properties 

 are intended, that we have thus far had, distinctly placed 

 the creation of peasant proprietorship upon its accepted 

 programme in the 'seventies. 



One argument very freely employed against peasant 



