64 THE RURAL PROBLEM 



man can make a living on almost any piece of land. Agri- 

 culture is not an easy business ; and yet people commit in 

 connection with land follies which they would not dream of 

 committing in connection with any other business. The 

 Mayland Small Holdings experiment is a case in point. In 

 the month of August, 1905, Mr. Joseph Fels, who is known 

 throughout the whole world as a shrewd business man, bought 

 an estate situated on the River Blackwater, in the parish of 

 Mayland, in the county of Essex. Fired with the wholly 

 laudable determination to use a portion of it for small 

 holdings, he spared no expense in laying out the holdings 

 and providing for some twenty-one men a substantial cottage 

 each, with its own buildings and several acres of land. For 

 lack of quite elementary business considerations the scheme 

 broke down. In the first place there was no water at hand, 

 and even for mixing the mortar for building pond water had 

 to be purchased from neighbouring farms and carried to the 

 site. The soil was heavy clay ; and, as there were no roads, 

 carting became extremely difficult in wet weather, two horses 

 being required to move half a load. The place was so isolated 

 that during the building the workmen had to cycle six or 

 eight miles to and from their work. The soil was 

 expensive to work and unsuited to market gardening. It 

 had been devoted from time immemorial to corn-growing and 

 had suffered from recent neglect ; it was poisoned with weeds 

 for gardening purposes, and, even after being repeatedly 

 ploughed, the least neglect meant a jungle in which practi- 

 cally nothing but weeds could survive. Fruit-growing, which 

 was the main business selected, is not remunerative for 

 several years after planting, and it was found impossible for 

 the men to make a living out of subsidiary gardening during 

 the initial period. The men themselves were unsuitable, 

 because, out of over 1,000 applications, very few possessed the 

 £100 of capital which was a condition of acceptance, and 

 these were mostly townsmen with little or no previous 

 experience of the land. Even this £100 proved to be far too 

 little to provide tools, seeds, live stock, as well as to keep 

 the man in food until the first season's crops were harvested : 

 and the income from these was so meagre that even the most 

 thrifty of the men were left penniless in the second year. In 



