Agrarian Tenures. 
861 
with the past, present, and future of agrarian legislation in the 
United Kingdom, cannot fail to be of interest at this time. 
The work is for the most part historical, that is to say, the 
greater part of it is occupied with tracing the history of land owner- 
ship, including a more detailed view of the efforts of Parliament 
in the last twenty-five years to reform or reconstitute the relations to 
one another of the various classes of the agricultural communities 
in the United Kingdom. 
So far as it is historical, it offers a useful and on the whole ac- 
curate rfeumd of recent land legislation. After describing the 
earlier characteristics of land ownership in England, Mr. Shaw 
Lefevre proceeds as follows : — 
Great changes have taken place in the conditions of rural England in 
the course of the last 200 years. The two classes of yeomen farmers and 
peasant proprietors have all but completely disappeared in every part of the 
country. A few yeomen farmers, indeed, still exist in the mountainous 
parts of Wales and in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Devonshire. A few 
peasant owners or smaller yeomen are to be found in districts where there 
still remain large areas of common lands, as in the New Forest, Ashdown 
Forest, Dartmoor, and the Welsh and Cumberland Moors. There are also 
a few communities of small peasant owners in Lincolnshire, especially in 
the district known as the Island of Axholme, where a colony of Dutchmen 
many years ago introduced the system of small ownerships. But these cases 
are exceptional. 
The causes for this almost total extinction of small owners he 
considers to be the prestige and amenities incidental to land owner- 
ship on a large scale, which have tended to the aggregation of large 
properties, the enclosure of common lands, and also what he calls 
economic causes — i.e. the temptations offered to yeomen farmers to 
sell and invest the proceeds of their land in more profitable specula- 
tions. He does not, perhaps, sufficiently dwell upon what it is sub- 
mitted has been the most potent cause of the phenomenon under 
consideration — namely, the difficulty under the altered conditions 
of agriculture, and having l'egard to the ever-increasing imports 
of foreign agricultural produce, of making a living at all out of the 
cultivation of a small quantity of land — though he has not alto- 
gether lost sight of this fact. The difficulty we refer to and its 
results are illustrated by the instance the author gives of the parish 
in which he himself resides : — 
In the Kentish parish where the writer lives, consisting of about 2,400 
acres, where the land is fairly distributed and is purely rural, and where 
from the growth of fruit it might be expected that small ownerships would be 
cultivated to advantage, there is not a siugle case of a peasant owner making 
a living out of his land. There are eight or ten cases of village tradesmen 
owning small holdings of land from one acre to ten acres and cultivating 
them for profit, but not making a living out of them. There are a few cases 
of retired tradesmen who have bought land of from two acres up to twenty in 
the parish, and who cultivate it partly for profit, partly for amusement, but 
who do not make their living out of it. These two last classes are of great 
