356 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CHAP. 



even in bad years they should not lose, while in average 

 years they should obtain such profits, that, either by 

 increase of the size of their holding or the amount of their 

 stock, their condition should steadily improve, and thus 

 ensure them against poverty in old age. If land-national- 

 ization is to be the success we hope it will be, some such 

 result as this must be aimed at, and we must be sure that 

 we do nothing to prevent its attainment. 



In order to bring about this result two things are 

 especially required first, a certain amount of knowledge, 

 of experience, of prudence, and of industry in those who 

 obtain these small holdings ; in the second place, such very 

 moderate rents and such favourable conditions of tenure 

 as to give them not only a chance but almost a certainty 

 of success. Nothing, in my opinion, is more likely to 

 bring about the failure of the first, and therefore the most 

 important experiments in this direction than the methods 

 usually suggested by politicians, and more or less implied 

 in the various Acts of Parliament, whether already passed 

 or proposed, dealing with this matter. It is, for example, 

 almost always proposed or taken for granted, that before 

 the men can have the land a large cost must be incurred 

 in preparing it for them. We hear of road-making, 

 fencing, draining, and house-building, as if these were 

 absolute necessities ; and in addition to all this, it is 

 generally thought that it will be necessary to advance 

 capital to the proposed tenants to enable them to stock and 

 crop their holdings, and support themselves till they get 

 a return from the land. Now I can hardly imagine a more 

 certain way of bringing discredit on the whole system of 

 small holdings and with it of land-nationalization than 

 such a method. In the first place, this work of " laying 

 out " and " improvement," when it is not done by the 

 occupiers themselves, but for them, by persons who have 

 no interest in doing the work economically but often the 

 reverse, and who have besides no personal knowledge of 

 what these small cultivators really require, will often be 

 unnecessary work and will always be done in an un- 

 necessarily costly way, and will thus add to the rent of the 

 land, without proportionately increasing its value. Then 



