10 
Large and Small Holdings. 
it having 5000 inhabitants. There was land equally good for every agricul- 
tural purpose, which I will engage to say was capable of growing any sort of 
crop as well and at little more cost, which was offered and fetched only 18L 
an acre. The whole of that diflerence being due to the position of the lands 
that were sold." 
When labour was very cheap and employment was scarce^ 
the labourer, who had saved enough to take a small plot of land, 
soon found that he could make more of his bone and sinew by 
working for himself. Now the labourer gives his employer less 
skill and shorter hours, and yet receives more wages ; if he can 
find employment (and good labourers are scarcer than ever), he 
is certainly better off than the vast majority of small farmers, 
A thoughtful writer, who has made this subject his special 
study, says : " When the agricultural labourer becomes a small 
farmer, he often exchanges moderate hours and regular wages 
for incessant toil and a meagre competency." But yet the 
small occupier has this pull over his big neighbour. By 
" doing the work of two labourers and living at the expense 
of one," and with the assistance of his wife and children, he now 
saves that labour which costs the large farmer 50 per cent, 
more than it did 50 years ago. Yet, after all, if the value of the 
article produced will not pay for the cost of its production, the 
small as well as the large farmer must soon cease to produce that 
article ; and there is little or nothing now grown upon the culti- 
vated land of England which leaves a fair profit at present prices. 
One after another of the products of the farm have ceased to 
be remunerative, while many of them are grown at a consider- 
able loss. It is little use telling farmers to alter their course of 
cropping, for no sooner do they substitute one produce for 
another than it becomes more depressed than the original crop. 
For instance : Norfolk farmers were told to leave off growing 
wheat, and turn their attention more to meat and barley. Barley 
that will make excellent public-house beer now sells as low as 
'lis. per quarter. Beef is now lower than it has been since 
1851, and if sheep were not short in numbers, and keep very 
plentiful, mutton would be equally depressed. The smaller 
farmer is advised to grow fruit, but the prospect last sumnjer 
of acres of gooseberry and currant bushes, and hundreds of 
plum-trees, all laden with fruit that would not pay forgathering, 
was not encouraging. Another point is that fruit-farming 
yields the most precarious income of any class of husbandry. 
First of all, it requires a considerable amount of capital to start 
with, for fruit-trees, and even bushes, do not grow crops in their 
infancy. Then there may be an enormous yield when the 
jnarkets are glutted, and the prices, as those of last year,, 
become ruinously law, or there may be absolutely no fruit. 
