124 Large and Small Holdings 



be willing to pay a considerable price for them; if on political grounds, 

 or from negligence, carelessness or ignorance they prefer to lower the 

 rents of their large corn-growing tenants rather than to support those 

 tenants who are prepared to wring greater results from the soil by the 

 sweat of their brows, then they have certainly become monopolists of 

 the worst type, and from an economic point of view are a superfluous 

 class. Every modification of rent allowed to a corn-growing farmer 

 on land where small holdings would make a greater profit is a premium 

 offered by the landowner for the maintenance of an economically 

 retrograde agriculture. Land has so far become a luxury. It pro- 

 duces, with the help of privately provided bounties in the form of 

 lowered rents, commodities, such as corn, which could be imported 

 more cheaply from abroad ; whereas if managed on purely capitalist 

 principles it would only produce commodities in which it could com- 

 pete on equal terms with the foreigner. 



Such is the conflict between the problem of the proper unit of 

 holding and the problem of landownership as the two stand in England 

 at present : and so much it has been necessary to premise in order to 

 explain the origin of the movement which from 1880 onwards has 

 demanded the multiplication of small holdings by means of State 

 interference. The measures passed for this purpose, and above all 

 the Small Holdings Act of 1907, may well be described as measures 

 of agrarian reform. For they are attempts to reform the present 

 conditions of landownership in England in so far as they have been 

 found a hindrance to a healthy development of agricultural small 

 holdings. 



