xix SOME OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 357 



again, the advance of money on loan to men who have 

 never, perhaps, had ten pounds to spend at once in their 

 lives, will in many cases lead to its injudicious expendi- 

 ture, and be antagonistic to that prudence, thrift, and 

 industry, which are vital to success. 



There is yet another, and a very important objection to 

 such methods as these. All this expenditure of public 

 money by other people than those who are to directly 

 benefit by it, will certainly lead to wastefulness and 

 jobbery, since they constitute that very " management of 

 land by public officials," the evils of which form one of 

 the chief objections to land-nationalization, and which all 

 our proposals and methods have been calculated to avoid. 

 We must therefore never cease to urge that such man- 

 agement is not only unnecessary, but is calculated to 

 defeat the very purpose for which free access to land is 

 required. 



If we consult the reports of the various Royal Com- 

 missions on Agriculture we shall find numerous cases of 

 labourers, miners, mechanics, and others, who have become 

 successful cultivators of small holdings and sometimes of 

 considerable farms, often having begun with a lease of 

 waste land which they enclosed, improved, and built houses 

 on, entirely on their own resources and through their own 

 industry ; and whenever we find a successful small farmer 

 he has usually worked his way up by some such method. 

 It is an extraordinary thing that whenever it is proposed 

 to allow men to obtain small holdings in England, there 

 is always this talk of "improvements" and "house- 

 building," in addition to giving the land at a fair rent 

 and on a secure tenure; while over a large part of 

 Scotland and Ireland all improvements and all buildings 

 have been done by the tenants themselves, with no 

 security of tenure whatever, so that whenever a misfortune 

 prevents payment of rent usually rent on the tenants' 

 own improvements the landlord ejects the poor tenant 

 and confiscates his improvements. The Irish cottar and 

 the Highland crofter ask nothing better than a sufficiency 

 of land at a moderate rent and on a secure tenure. All 

 the perennial misery and often-recurring famine of these 



