164 PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE 



times consciously, more often unconsciously. 

 Such efforts were, in theory, designed to give 

 the labourer some interest in the land, 

 to attach him to his village ; but they were 

 for the most part timid and half-hearted 

 measures, some of which were apparently 

 devised as mere political window-dressing, and 

 were never intended to effect more than an 

 absolute minimum of change. The failure of 

 this earlier legislation was indeed notorious. 

 Thirty-two cottages were built under the Act 

 of 1890 ; that of 1892 secured 880 acres 

 in fifteen years ! 



Any real " colonization of England " by 

 the creation of a large number of small holdings 

 would not be the establishment of a wholly 

 new order, but rather the restoration, under 

 new forms, of an old one. To any one with a 

 sense of history, the transformation of rural 

 England into a country of large farms, worked 

 by proletarian labour, is a purely modern 

 movement. The old social economy of the 

 countryside, which survived intact until the 

 middle of the eighteenth century, was one of 

 small farms and communal agriculture. It 

 required, no doubt, considerable changes of 

 form to bring it into harmony with the new 

 circumstances of the national life. But what 

 we did was to break it down deliberately, 



