APPENDIX I 



THE MODERN SMALL FARMER AND THE QUESTION OF HOME 

 COLONISATION: A PROBLEM OF SOCIOLOGY 



PERHAPS German experience under the German settlement laws best 

 shows what class of settlers is most suited to take up small holdings. They 

 are men who were themselves in their earlier life little independent cultivators, 

 or industrial workers living on the land, who have held a bit of land as 

 a by-employment; or else peasants' sons, such as come from the west into 

 Posen and West Prussia in order to be able to obtain land of their own. 

 That is to say they are in any case men of peasant stock. "We see," 

 writes Herr Belgard, "how e.g. the Westphalians and Hanoverians take the 

 fine old peasant holdings of their homes for their model, and turn all their 

 efforts to the creation of an equally stable property and equally excellent 

 live-stock upon it 1 ." It is the same class who when they emigrate become 

 hard-working cultivators in foreign lands. Everywhere they carry with them 

 a tradition and an ideal, in the memory of the conditions under which they 

 grew up. 



How different are the conditions in England ! There is no peasantry to 

 draw upon, unless in a few isolated districts such as the Isle of Axholme or 

 a few places in Cumberland where yeomen of the old type are still to be 

 found. The sons of small or medium farmers are early employed on their 

 father's farm or on that of some neighbour; but when they grow up they 

 begin to move away. They see nothing specially honourable in the fact that 

 their father holds a farm, which, under the capitalist tenant-farmer system, 

 may be here to-day and there to-morrow ; they do not see in it any hereditary 

 obligation, or even anything which they desire to imitate. On the contrary, 

 they are without traditions, and are only desirous of making their way 

 into spheres which seem to them more satisfactory. Town life and 

 industrial employment attract them. The father may have worked his way 

 up from the position of a mere wage-earner to that of an independent farmer, 

 and so after a long struggle have attained the goal of his highest hopes. But 

 to the son that position seems a matter of course, and the desire for a higher 

 social and economic standing awakes in him very early. 



1 M. Belgard, Parzellierung und Innere Colonisation, Leipzig, 1907, pp. 340 f. 



