A FULL REWARD FOR THE TILLER. 387 



like the German " landscliaft " or " mortgage bank " — the 

 system of the Credit Fonder is rather different — giving 

 credit on an " amortisable " plan, are enabled to pay easily 

 for their properties. As land credit has recently been 

 organised in East Prussia, with special provision for second 

 and third mortgages, up to nearly the full value of the 

 property, the owner's payment in cash down for the free- 

 hold has become negligible, wherever the purchaser chooses 

 to take advantage of the facilities offered. 



Our own Agriculture, like those of foreign countries, 

 furnishes very instructive evidence of the intimate con- 

 nection between cultivating ownership and agricultural 

 prosperity. During the period of remarkable agricultural 

 advance that this country has seen, in the period from 

 about 1780 to about 1813, even without the existence of 

 those effective aids to smaller ownership that we in part 

 already possess now, and in part are promised within a 

 measurable distance of time, that is. Co-operation and Rural 

 Credits, owning occupiership spread fast and spread wide 

 over the country, and produced most noteworthy results, 

 in the sense of improved scientific cultivation and substantial 

 production. Mr. Prothero, in his truly admirable " English 

 Farming, Past and Present," remarks upon the " excep- 

 tional activity in agricultural progress " which marked 

 that period. And he adds that it was on the properties 

 of farming owners and of larger farmers that the improve- 

 ments introduced originated. Intelligent farmers were 

 everywhere found purchasing holdings. " The opulent 

 farmer who has purchased the farm he lives on," so says 

 the Shropshire Report of 1803, " is a character that has 

 increased." From Norfolk, William Marshall had reported 

 sixteen years previously that many farmers had prospered 

 enough to buy their holdings and " to add to them numerous 

 small estates of the yeomanry. ' ' According to the testimony 

 of Arthur Young, farmers were " freely buying holdings in 

 Essex." In Leicestershire " yeomanry of the higher class 

 abounded." " Men cultivating their own estates of two, 

 three, four and five hundreds a year are thickly scattered 

 over almost every part of the country." This was not 



