io8 Large and Small Holdings 



sold. So that of 52 acres of arable only 8| would serve to grow corn 

 for the market, and the other 43^ would be for stock-feeding and 

 potato growing. 



The small farms of the eighteenth century, previous to the agrarian 

 revolution, had produced little corn for the market, and the revived 

 small farms of the nineteenth century follow in their steps. "Cows, 

 pigs, poultry and vegetables are the four chief sources of profit that 

 would come off a (small) farm, to enable a tenant to do well ; and 

 I should say that nearly all small farmers would carry out the same 

 system," said a witness before the 1880 Commission 1 . A priori, the 

 natural result must have been that small farms, pursuing the now 

 most profitable branches of agriculture, would prosper much more 

 than the large farms, which were to a great extent dependent on the 

 increasingly unprofitable production of corn. It remains to consider 

 whether this a priori deduction is justified by the facts : whether, as a 

 result of the different branches of production pursued on large and 

 small farms respectively, the latter actually prospered better than the 

 former in the period of the crisis. 



Unfortunately the question has never been put precisely in this 

 form. The Royal Commissions of 1880-1 and 1894-7 considered the 

 position of large and small holdings in general, without special atten- 

 tion to the branch of production pursued, and arrived at the somewhat 

 vague conclusion that the small farms had, not everywhere, but in 

 particular districts under special conditions, proved better capable of 

 standing against the crisis than the large. But examples were 

 adduced to show that in some cases the small farmers had suffered 

 even more acutely than the large, and it was therefore concluded that 

 the small farm system was not universally superior to the large farm 

 system. The Reports, therefore, cannot be used in this matter without 

 first being subjected to a critical analysis. It is not sufficient simply 

 to state that in such and such a district small farms did better, and 

 in such another worse. The interesting question is why this was so, 

 and it cannot as a rule be answered by mere statistics. The varying 

 profitableness of the different branches of agriculture makes it 

 antecedently probable that the class of holdings which suffered least 

 would be that on which the more profitable branches were pursued. 

 In other words, the small farms, which were mainly devoted to stock- 

 feeding and market-gardening, would as a rule have the advantage 

 over the mainly corn-growing large farms. The exceptions, that is to 

 say the cases in which small farms suffered severely, prove the rule. 



1 Report on Agricultural Depression, 1881, qu. 62,310 (Mr Baghot de la Bere) ; also qu. 

 62,615. 



