382 THE FUTURE OF OUk AGRICULTURE. 



quite undeveloped ; and because the social and political 

 advantages attaching to large possessions in land weighed 

 so heavily in the balance as to be considered worth a fancy 

 price to the big man. All that is altered now. Thanks 

 to intensive farming and Co-operation the yeoman could 

 now certainly put in a good show as against his larger rival, 

 if not, indeed, give him points. Ample legitimate credit, 

 according to his possessions, has been placed within his 

 reach, if he will only grasp it. And democratic advance is 

 whittling away, one by one, the old feudal privileges— as it 

 has whittled them away even in ultraconservative Prussia. 

 Virtually the same thing may be said with regard to small, 

 holdership. In truth the whole rural fabric is assuming 

 an altered shape, in which the old squirearchy, with its 

 strict rule over tenants, stands out of place like a medieval 

 castle in the midst of a peaceful plain cultivated according 

 to modern notions, with no need for portcullises, draw- 

 bridges, arrows and spears, or any of the other paraphernalia 

 of knighthood. And to resist the natural movement of 

 progress is only to play the game of extreme Land Reformers 

 and Land Nationalisers. The recent rather considerable 

 purchase of holdings by their tenant occupiers — effected 

 more or less against the grain for a reason still to be con- 

 sidered — and, once more, such wholesale applications for 

 freehold holdings when — ^without reduction of the price 

 fixed for purchase — conditions of payment were offered 

 in accordance with the convenience of small purchasers, 

 as those already instanced, at Maulden, seem to prove that 

 there is readiness to buy, if only terms can be made to suit 

 buyers. On the other hand, the readiness to sell land on 

 the part of discontented landlords — to all appearance in 

 a not strictly justified pet (which after the outbreak of the 

 war not a few who manifested it are not unlikely to have 

 regretted) — appears to indicate that the general democra- 

 tisation of things — financial as well as social and political 

 — is beginning to tell on the other side and that landlords 

 with their long rent-rolls and their often correspondingly 

 long schedules of encumbrances, the costliness of their 

 credit, while fresh burdens are being laid upon them, their 



