SMALL HOLDINGS. 361 



where there is no special winter employment, seems to 

 prove that small holders can very well do without such 

 extraneous aid. They soon learn to accommodate their 

 summer outgoings to winter needs. And even though winter 

 — even the long winter of the Continent — bring enforced 

 idleness with it, on the balance they find themselves well 

 off with their small holdings. 



The dreaded " Hons in the way " thus turn out to be for 

 the most part imaginary rather than real, aHke as threatening 

 ownership holdings in particular and small holdings generally. 



If, on the economic side, there have been difficulties in 

 the way of successful small husbandry, Co-operation has 

 effectually cleared them away. A very teUing instance 

 showing the difference which small-ownership husbandry 

 makes to a country, deserving to be quoted is that of the 

 peasant proprietary of the Baltic Provinces of Russia. All 

 over Russia proper the great emancipation of serfs in 1861, 

 which failed to couple the possession of individual freehold 

 with freedom, produced a rural proletariat, the evils of 

 which have long weighed prejudicially upon the empire 

 — until by a munificent blotting out of the figure on the 

 land register a modern seivachxheia, they were remedied. 

 In the Baltic Provinces three laws decreed in 1863 made 

 the peasantry — who had not been actual serfs, although 

 bound dependants of the landlords — absolute freeholders, 

 compelling the landlords to turn over their land to them 

 in a very similar way to that applied in Prussia by the 

 memorable act of Stein and Hardenberg. The consequence 

 was that 2,716,000 peasants became at a stroke free owners 

 of their soil. Five years later, in 1868, a Baltic economist, 

 Herr Eckhardt, could write as follows : 



" Within a very few years the property of the peasants has 

 increased so rapidly that, in the aggregate, the small capitals 

 accumulated in their hands already amount to millions, and the 

 material condition of the small landowners may be described as, 

 on the whole, more satisfactory than that of the owners of 

 ' knights' estates,' more especially in Livonia, where bank- 

 ruptcies of noble landowners are steadily becoming more fre- 

 quent." 



