320 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



made up of 226 different purchases, nearly all of them cases 

 where the vendors belonged to the class of yeomen farmers, 

 or statesmen, as they are called in that district, who, them- 

 selves and their ancestors, had cultivated their own lands for 

 many generations. Instead then of 226 distinct owners of 

 land, there is now a single owner. It may safely be assumed, 

 in respect of this great property, that, under the existing system 

 of family entail permissible by law, it will for generations 

 to come remain intact in a single ownership." 



Lincolnshire still possessed a large number of small peasant 

 proprietors and some large yeomen farmers, in 1895. Many 

 farmers had bought land during the prosperous times prior to 

 1875, and had paid double the price for which it would sell 

 after the fall in prices had brought on the depression. A large 

 proportion of the purchase money had frequently been obtained 

 by giving a mortgage on the land, and in some cases the land 

 had fallen in value until it was worth less than the face value of 

 the mortgage. Fox says of these men : " Many . . . have 

 already sunk, overwhelmed by the burden of interest they had 

 to pay." Mr. Fox devotes several pages to the condition of 

 the small landowning farmers of the southern part of 'Lincoln- 

 shire. Most of these people worked hard and lived poorly. 

 In reading the report one might easily think Mr. Fox was para- 

 phrasing Young's report on the same district, written one hun- 

 dred years before, were it not for the further evidence of ruin 

 on every hand. In speaking of these small proprietors, Fox 

 says : " The possession of land has been the ruin of hundreds 

 in the past and is a millstone around the neck of hundreds in the 

 present. Not the least regrettable reflection in this sad story 

 is that most of these small owners are the flower of a class, the 

 pick of the foremen and the laborers, who excelled in the 

 performance of their duties, who toiled and saved and denied 

 themselves for years to raise themselves out of one class into 

 another, and who, when they had bought their independence 

 and a new social position, found themselves bound to admit 

 failure, their hard savings gone, their energies wasted, their 

 hopes crushed, to retrace their steps back into the ranks out of 



