140 APPENDIX 



hand in increasing areas year by year. For example, 

 in the small province of Oldenburg about an average 

 of 60 settlers per annum were placed on reclaimed land 

 between 1901 and 1910, but the numbers rose to 130 

 in 1910, and 166 in 1911, each colonist possessing some 

 20-25 acres of land that had been added to the culti- 

 vated area. So convinced of the economic soundness 

 of the process had the State become that in 1913 

 the Prussian Diet sanctioned a loan of IJ milHons 

 sterling, half of which was to be devoted to State 

 schemes of reclamation, £150,000 to drainage, and 

 £500,000 was to be used in subventions to provincial 

 schemes of reclamation. This contrast between the 

 action of the two countries is not to be accounted for 

 simply by the difference in fiscal policies and the 

 higher prices for agricultural produce ruling in Ger- 

 many ; it is in the main due to the fact that the 

 Germans had studied the problem and were employing 

 modern resources, both in the way of knowledge and 

 materials, to the treatment of the land. The same 

 process has been going on in the free-trade countries 

 of Holland and Belgium. In Great Britain no advance 

 had been made upon the methods in vogue at the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century, the land was 

 drained where necessary, the rough vegetation was 

 burnt off, the soil broken up, the only treatment 

 other than mechanical being a dressing of lime. Once 

 cleansed the land was put under the ordinary crops, 

 with as a rule extremely poor results for many years, 

 though eventually, by dint of perseverance and an 

 annual expenditure that was in the aggregate con- 

 siderable, though perhaps not large in any one year, 



