294 = 25 
British Agriculture. 
Proportion of 
landowners to 
whole popula- 
tion,320,000 to 
33,000,000. 
Increased by 
the interests 
of tenant 
farmers as 
part owners of 
agricultural 
property. 
and mines, while they can supply us with corn at a cheaper rate 
than we can grow it at home. Our present relation with foreign 
countries is becoming like that of a crowded capital, which 
draws its fresh supplies of vegetables, milk, and meat, from the 
market-gardens, meadows, and rich grazings in its vicinity, but 
looks to more distant lands for the corn and other commodities 
which bear long transport from cheaper and more distant farms. 
More than one-half of our corn is now of foreign growth, and 
nearly one-fourth of our meat and dairy produce ; whilst year by 
year our corn-land is giving place to the more profitable produce 
afforded by the milk and grazing and market-garden farms, which 
are gradually extending their circle. Such produce renders the 
land more valuable, more tempting prices are offered for it to the 
small landowners, and their numbers decrease. Wealthy men 
from the mines and manufactories and shipping and colonial 
interests, and the learned professions, desire to become pro- 
prietors of land ; and some competition exists between them 
and those landowners whose increasing wealth tempts them 
on suitable opportunities to enlarge the boundaries of their 
domains. Thus small proprietors are bought out, and agricultural 
landowners diminish in number ; while, side by side with them^ 
vast urban populations are growing up, having no other connec- 
tion with the land than that of affording the best market for its 
produce. 
The Domesday Book for the United Kingdom, lately pub- 
lished, divides the landowners into two classes — those who 
have less than one acre of land, and those who have one acre 
and upwards. The former comprise 70 per cent, of the whole ^ 
but as none of this class has so much as an acre, and they 
hold altogether less than a two-hundredth part of the land, 
they may be regarded as householders only. Excluding these 
as not properly agricultural landowners, it may then fairly be 
said that one person in every hundred of the entire popula- 
tion is a landowner. Subdividing that figure by the average 
numbers of each family, it may be concluded that every twentieth 
head of a family is an owner of land. 
But the tenant farmers are entitled also to be reckoned as part 
owners of agricultural property, for in the crops and live and dead 
stock they own equal to one-fifth of the whole capital value of the 
land. Part of this is incorporated with the soil, and it is all as 
indispensable for the production of crops as the land itself. As. 
cultivators, they employ and possess individually a larger capital 
than the peasant proprietors of other countries in their double 
capacity as owners and cultivators. They are 1,1 GO, 000 in 
number, and when added to 320,000 owners of one acre andji 
upwards, make 1,480,000 altogether, engaged in the owner-|( 
