220 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



take a return on his investment much less than he can make by 

 investing it in farming, and even less by 2 or 3 per cent than 

 he would have to pay for borrowed money, but the fees and 

 other charges which he must pay for transferring land are so high 

 that they amount to an important per cent of the price of the land. 

 The smaller the purchase the greater, relatively, is this expense. 

 In case of a large estate the cost of making a transfer is compar- 

 atively small, but where the purchase money is one thousand 

 pounds or less the charges are enormous. Hoskyns 1 gives a set of 

 tables showing the cost of transferring land. According to those 

 figures the purchaser's average expense, irrespective of the stamp 

 duty, for purchases of one thousand pounds or less in value was 

 about 6 per cent of the purchase money, and in one case where 

 the sum paid for the land was only one hundred pounds, the 

 purchaser's expense of transfer, aside from the stamp duty, was 

 more than 23 per cent. It is claimed that the vender's expenses 

 were, in every case, much higher. 



There has been an agitation in recent years which looks towards 

 the reestablishment of peasant proprietors in England. The Small 

 Holdings Act of 1892 2 made provisions by which each county 

 council was empowered to acquire land, improve it and sell it 

 to the small farmers on unusually favorable terms, but this has 

 had no important influence upon the ownership of land by the 

 farming classes. 



SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS 



We have seen that two hundred years ago more than half 

 the farmers of England owned the land which they cultivated. 

 Today practically all are tenants. 



This extinction of the yeomanry took place in some parts of 

 England during the eighteenth century. In some counties this 

 was a result of the " new agriculture " which made enclosures and 

 large farms more profitable than small farms in the common fields. 

 The new agriculture required, also, that more capital be applied 



1 " Systems of Land Tenure," Cobden Club Essays. 



2 55 and 56 Vict. C, 31. 



