THE SITUATION IN 1908 317 



arrange with any Borough Council or Urban District Council 

 to act as its agent in providing and managing small holdings. 

 The duty of supplying allotments rests in the first instance 

 with the Rural Parish Councils, though if they do not take 

 proper steps to provide allotments, the County Council may 

 itself provide them. 



It is a praiseworthy effort, though marked by arbitrary 

 methods and that contempt for the rights of property, pro- 

 vided it belongs to some one else, that is a characteristic of 

 to-day. That it will succeed where the small holder has 

 some other trade, and in exceptionally favoured situations, is 

 very probable ; most of the small holders who were successful 

 before the Act had something to fall back upon : they were 

 dealers, hawkers, butchers, small tradesmen, &c. There is no 

 doubt, too, that an allotment helps both the town artisan and 

 the country labourer to tide over slack times. Whether it 

 will succeed in planting a rural population on English soil is 

 another matter. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished, 

 for a country without a sound reserve of healthy country- 

 people is bound to deteriorate. The small holder, pure and 

 simple, without any by-industry, has hitherto only been able 

 to keep his head above water by a life which without ex- 

 aggeration may be called one of incessant toil and frequent 

 privation, such a life as the great mass of our * febrile factory 

 element' could not endure. And if there is one tendency 

 more marked than another in the history of English agricul- 

 ture, it is the disappearance of the small holding. In the 

 Middle Ages it is probable that the average size of a man's 

 farm was 30 acres, with its attendant waste and wood ; since 

 then amalgamation has been almost constant. 



It is true that the occupier of a few acres often brings to 

 bear on it an amount of industry which is greater in propor- 

 tion than that bestowed on a large farm ; but the large farmer 

 has, as Young pointed out long ago, very great advantages. 

 He is nearly always a man of superior intelligence and train- 



