SMALL HOLDINGS 195 



Agriculture, have absolutely nothing to do 

 with the Act and leave the small-holder 

 entirely outside its safeguards and security. 

 Some interesting points arise with regard 

 to the quantity andjquality of the applicants 

 for small holdings. In 1908, the first year of 

 the Act's working, 23,285 men applied for 

 land, and of this number no fewer than 

 10,083 were rejected as unsuitable ! This 

 wholesale refusal of nearly 50 per cent, of the 

 applicants has not received the attention it 

 deserves. It is repeated in the figures for 

 1909, for out of 3,598 fresh applicants, 1,609 

 were refused a place on the " approved '* 

 list. A slight improvement occurs in 1912 : 

 nevertheless, two in five of the latest appli- 

 cants were refused. On what grounds were 

 these sweeping rejections made ? Nobody 

 would, of course, deny for a moment that 

 some of the applicants may have been 

 notoriously drunken, idle, or hopelessly 

 inefficient, and as such most justifiably 

 excluded from the benefits of the new law. 

 But pretexts of a wholly different order have 

 sufficed in some cases to bring about the 

 removal of a man's name from the list. Some- 

 times the very natural resentment displayed 

 by poor men against rough, inquisitorial 

 methods of gauging the amount of their 



