GERMAN EXAMPLE 71 



generally by the enterprise of the tenant farmers, who, 

 with or without improving leases, gradually drained 

 and cleaned up the rough land adjacent to their 

 holdings. The process stopped with the great fall in 

 agricultural prices ; the cost of the labour to clear the 

 land ceased to be repaid by the value of its produce, 

 for at that time labour was the main, almost the only 

 item in the cost of reclamation. In Great Britain no 

 new factor has arisen to alter the situation. In Ger- 

 many, however, the march of events has been very 

 different ; the cultivation of the waste lands — moor 

 and heath — has been taken in hand in increasing areas 

 year by year. For example, in the small province of 

 Oldenburg, about an average of sixty settlers per annum 

 were placed on reclaimed land between 1901 and 1910 ; 

 but the numbers rose to 130 in 1910 and 166 in 1911, 

 each colonist possessing some 20 to 25 acres of land that 

 had been added to the cultivated area. So convinced 

 of the economic soundness of the process had the State 

 become that in 1913 the Prussian Diet sanctioned a 

 loan of 1 \ millions sterling, half of which was to be 

 devoted to State schemes of reclamation, £150,000 to 

 drainage, and £500,000 was to be used in subventions 

 to provincial schemes of reclamation. This contrast 

 between the action of the two countries is not to be 

 accounted for simply by the difference in fiscal policies 

 and the higher prices for agricultural produce ruling in 

 Germany ; it is, in the main, due to the fact that the 

 Germans had studied the problem and were employing 

 modern resources, both in the way of knowledge and 

 materials, to the treatment of the land. The same 

 process has been going on in the free trade countries of 

 Holland and Belgium. In Great Britain no advance 



