68 THE RURAL PROBLEM 



time to come— that is to say, private individuals and not the 

 State will continue to own the farms.* Landowners will 

 be burdened with death duties and super-taxes on the one 

 hand, while on the other hand the community will continue 

 to take constantly larger powers of acquiring land. As this 

 process develops the farmer will more and more tend to 

 become the tenant of the community rather than of the land- 

 lord. But any drastic expropriation of the landlord is 

 unlikely to take place yet, primarily for the reason that con- 

 fiscation of property in land is obviously impracticable while 

 other forms of property are allowed to escape. 



The politically urgent problem is therefore the position of 

 the small holder.f From the public point of view ownership 

 is undesirable for the reason, among others, that small owners 

 are apt to divide their property at death, and this minute 

 subdivision of land is recognised as a serious evil in countries 

 where peasant proprietorship prevails. J 



From the point of view of the small holder the case 

 against ownership is overwhelming. He is always handi- 

 capped by want of capital, and he prefers to invest such 

 capital as he possesses in stock, farming capital, etc., which 

 yield a good return, rather than in land which will pay him 

 only 2| per cent, or 3 per cent. Virtually, however much 

 capital he has, he prefers to rent, a larger acreage rather than 

 to purchase land, for the purchase of land ties him to one 

 place and renders it difficult for him to increase his holding. 

 A successful tenant can move to a larger farm, but the 

 chance that a small owner can buy more land adjacent to his 

 own whenever he wants it is remote. But there is another 



* Twelve per cent, of the farmers of England own their own land. 

 In Denmark the proportion is over 80 per cent. 



f The case against ownership is stated very fully and clearly 

 by Edwin Pratt in his book The Transition in Agriculture, 

 Chap. 18 and seq., which was published in 1900, just before the question 

 became a party one with the Act of 1907. Mr. Pratt is well known 

 as a supporter of the Conservative Party in a general way and often 

 writes from an extreme partisan standpoint. His strong opposition 

 to peasant proprietorship is therefore valuable testimony from a source 

 certainly untainted. 



t La Terre, by Emile Zola, is based on the evils arising from this 

 in France. 



