216 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



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 Lincolnshire. Most 

 of these people worked hard and lived poorly. In reading the 

 report one might easily think Mr. Fox was paraphrasing Young's 

 report on the same district, written one hundred 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 mill-stone 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 in- 

 dependence 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 which they had stepped, at a time of life when they had 

 expended much of their vitality and all their ambition." 2 



In Cambridgeshire the depression proved very disastrous to 

 the farmers generally. The landowning farmers, burdened with 

 mortgages, were the first to succumb ; and those of this class 

 who remained, in 1895, were in great straits. " In several 

 districts," says Fox, " evidence was privately given me of this, 

 and in one of them a gentleman, who was in the position to 

 know the facts, stated that all the yeoman farmers there . . . 

 were heavily mortgaged." 3 



" We have had a good many yeomen in the county of Norfolk," 

 said Mr. Read before the commission in 1897, "and I say that 

 they are much the hardest hit of all. They have to bear both the 

 losses of the landlord and the losses of the tenant, and there have 

 been the most disastrous failures. A good many of our farmers 



1 Fox, "Lincolnshire," in Parliamentary Papers, 1895, C- 7571. 



2 Ibid., 190. 



3 I bid., " Report on the County of Cambridge," in Parliamentary Papers, 

 1895, C.-7871, 53. 



