222 Appendix I 



and in one year saved as much as ^90. He had planted no less than 1400 

 fruit trees, and in one year sold 1000 head of poultry. In another case 

 Mr Impey was astonished to find a man paying ^5 rent for \ of an acre. 

 But the occupier told him that the value of the strawberries sold off that bit 

 of ground in the last year had been about ^58. It is no wonder that 

 townsmen, hearing such stories, begin to think that there is " something to be 

 made out of" even the land, if a man only goes about it in the right way. 



The material for home colonisation in England, then, is roughly of two 

 classes. Men who have grown up under the influences of the town, men of 

 commercial or industrial tendencies, stand side by side with men who have 

 lived all their lives upon the land. There is room for both. Both, under the 

 given conditions of production and distribution, that is to say in certain branches 

 of production and under certain market conditions, may be fit instruments for 

 the re-organisation of the unit of agricultural holding in England. There- 

 fore what at first sight seems an extraneous element in modern agricultural 

 society, viz. the quondam townsman or the man of city instincts, is not in fact 

 to be regarded as an artificial product of reforming zeal. His appearance is 

 a necessary result of the economic transition through which English agricul- 

 ture has been passing in consequence of the ruin of what was once its special 

 branch of production. And for this reason the lack of a peasant population 

 will prove no fatal hindrance to the home colonisation of England. In many 

 districts it is not peasantry of the old style who are appearing or who can 

 appear. Agriculturists of quite other qualifications and outlook are in course 

 of development ; agriculturists for whom a quite different social and 

 economic organisation is growing up from that which the little farmers or 

 yeomanry of the past could ever have possessed. 



