Change in Unit 95 



peasant properties, small farms and allotments, also on purely social 

 grounds, as in the Allotments and Small Holdings Act, 1892, the 

 forerunner of the Small Holdings Act of 1907. The earlier Act was 

 due first and foremost to the energy of Mr Jesse Collings, then still 

 a member of the Radical party. Since the early eighties he had 

 moved almost every year for an enquiry into the small holdings 

 question. In 1889 he brought in a Bill containing a detailed scheme 

 for their revival by means of the local authorities. In the same year 

 the Select Committee was appointed, and in 1892 his Bill, with 

 unimportant alterations, became law. Social reformers hoped much 

 from it : especially that, as the President of the Board of Agriculture 

 (Mr Chaplin) pointed out, it might hinder the rural exodus 1 . The 

 Radicals looked to the systematic creation of peasant properties to 

 put an end to the land-monopoly of the great landlords. The 

 Conservative Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, favoured the Bill, 

 because, as he said, " I believe that a small proprietary constitutes 

 the strongest bulwark against revolutionary change, and affords the 

 soundest support for the Conservative feeling and institutions of the 

 country 2 ." 



Private effort, political agitation and Government action were 

 thus all active in promoting the formation of small holdings on social 

 grounds from 1880 onwards. But the reader will remember that 

 such attempts were nothing new : and there is no probability that 

 they would have produced more effect at the end of the nineteenth 

 century than they had done in its fourth decade or at its beginning, 

 if the position had not been altered in an essential point. The 

 arguments of the social reformer were no longer in blank opposition 

 to the actual economic tendencies of the day. On the contrary, by 

 the side of his rather timid efforts there now arose a strong move- 

 ment for the creation of small holdings on purely economic grounds. 

 This movement it was which made the question as to the proper unit 

 of holding once more a real question ; and to it, therefore, the main 

 attention of the historian is due. 



It proceeded naturally in the first instance from the landlords, 

 who found that, if their rents were to be kept up, they must cease to 

 consolidate farms and on the contrary must cut up the large holdings 

 as opportunity offered. After 1880 this tendency becomes increas- 

 ingly evident 3 . The Report of the Select Committee of 1889 states 



1 Parliamentary Debates, 1892, Vol. I, p. 911. 



9 Speech at Exeter, on Feb. 3rd, 1892, quoted in Shaw Lefevre, op. cit. p. 85. 



3 E.g. Small Holdings Report, 1889, qu. 4005, where the land-agent Mr Squarey says : 



