xxiii THE SOCIAL QUAGMIRE 419 



women who work hard and live poorly to make him rich. 

 The same land, if cultivated for themselves by an equal or 

 a larger number of workers, would produce far more per 

 acre, and would keep them all in comfort, instead of 

 making one man exceptionally well off while all the rest 

 live in uncertainty and poverty. And besides this 

 material difference, there is the moral effect of work on a 

 man's own homestead, where every hour's extra labour 

 increases the value of his property or the comfort of his 

 home, as compared with wage-work for a master who will 

 discharge him as soon as he ceases to want him, and in 

 whose work, therefore, he can take no interest. Experi- 

 ence in every part of the world shows that this moral 

 effect is one of the greatest advantages of securing to the 

 mass of the people homesteads of their very own. As 

 this aspect of the question is hardly ever discussed in 

 America, a few illustrative examples must be given. 



And first as to the profits of small farms as compared 

 with large ones. Lord Carrington has eight hundred 

 tenants of small plots of land around the town of High 

 Wy combe, Bucks., and he has recently stated that these 

 tenants get a net produce of forty pounds an acre, while 

 the most that the farmers can obtain from the same land 

 by plough cultivation is seven pounds an acre. Here is a 

 gain to the country of thirty- three pounds an acre by 

 peasant cultivation ; and it is all clear gain, for these men 

 are wage labourers, and their little plots of land are culti- 

 vated by themselves and their families in time that would 

 otherwise be wasted. 



Another case is that of the Rev. Mr. Tuckwell, of 

 Stockton, Warwickshire, who has let two hundred acres of 

 land to labourers in plots of from one to four acres, at fair 

 rents, and with security for fourteen years. Most of the 

 men with two acres grow enough wheat and potatoes to 

 supply their families for the whole year, besides providing 

 food for a pig, and all this by utilizing the spare time of 

 the family. These men grow forty bushels of wheat to 

 the acre, the farmer's average being less than thirty ; and 

 their other crops are good in proportion. 



Still more interesting is the Wellingborough Allotment 



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