SMALL HOLDINGS. 363 



on co-operative lines and adhere to them. Co-operation 

 has become the indispensable helpmeet of the small man. 

 To render its full benefit it should begin with the collective 

 buying or renting of the soil, which of course ensures a great 

 economy. But it should not end there. What we want, 

 and what we have thus far worked for only very half-heart- 

 edly, if at all, is to get more people, more households, on the 

 land. And that is best done — as it has been done in Prussia, 

 and also in Italy — in entire settlements. In such there 

 are the greatest opportunities for mutual help, and mutual 

 help is most easy and most useful. And the settlement 

 creates a new tone among the rural population. We want 

 Co-operation everywhere on the land, and we want examples 

 like those of such settlements as have been referred to, 

 to set it going. It is at the point of small holdings, for the 

 purpose of creating a rural population, that the great 

 " revolution in Agriculture " of which Lord Selborne, 

 when still President of the Board of Agriculture and Fisher- 

 ies, spoke at'the London School of Economics in March, 1916, 

 must begin.^ Statesmen judged rightly when they inscribed 

 the creation of small holdings as a pressing matter upon 

 their programme. In truth public sentiment was forcing 

 them to such course. From the time of the publication 

 of the " Modern Domesday " downward the feeling in that 

 direction has been growing. The Nation has awakened 

 bit by bit to the fact that the land was made for the people, 

 that it is the Nation's, and that it is property of a kind the 

 volume of which cannot be increased ad libitum, which 

 has to meet the wants of a growing population, by being 

 progressively adapted to its necessities, and from which 

 more is to be asked than dividends.. It wants to be made 

 " the People's " once more. And the starting point for 

 a new agricultural policy promising greater happiness and 

 contentment, as well as greater productiveness and a new 

 impetus to a great increase of the population, must be 

 " Small Holdings." 



