Small Holdings. 
87 
Despite industry, intelligence, and thrift, they now grasp the 
fact that their native villages are likely to afford them only the 
barest hope of independence. And the new generation of 
labourers has grown up under the direct influences of the peri- 
patetic politician, popular education, and a free and cheap press. 
They recognise the precariousness and dependence of their 
position, and revolt against it. They demand conditions more 
approaching equality, higher wages, greater opportunities of 
rising in the social scale. Their imagination is stimulated by 
all they hear and read of town life : its higher wages, its 
pleasures, its variety of openings for industry, strength and 
ability, added to some vague sense of possibilities which they 
dream exist ; and so they are leaving the country to the older 
and nearly worn-out men, to the apathetic and unambitious, 
adding to the crowds of the towns and intensifying their already 
pronounced labour difficulties. Meanwhile, in the towns, in the 
face of a declining trade which necessitates, for its mere pre- 
servation, lengthy hours and low rates of pay, labour clamours 
for increased advantages, for higher wages, and for extended 
leisure ; and the labourers from the country are only adding to 
a dangerous force of the discontented and unemployed, which, 
if trade continue to fall away, will thrust itself against the 
present conditions of commerce and of government. 
Recent Legislation. 
Small holdings may or may not be the best and most 
economic method of land culture, but, if they can be secured, 
they will tend to relax the labour tension in the towns, and 
strengthen the bonds of English society by restoring to the 
land the thousands of yeomen and labourer-proprietors who 
formed in the past one of the chief sources of the power and 
stability of the nation. English politicians of both historic 
parties have, in later years, given this fact recognition. What 
have they accomplished in the attempt to re-create these small 
ownerships, to stop the abnormal immigration into the towns, 
and to restore the political balance ? 
They have passed four notable Acts of Parliament : the Allot- 
ments Acts of 1887 and 1890, the Glebe Lands Act of 1888, and 
the Small Agricultural Holdings Act of 1892. 
The Allotments Act of 1887 was intended to obtain for the 
labourers, from the landlords, by hire, or purchase by agreement 
or compulsion, allotments not to exceed 1 acre in extent, and 
not to be sub-let, at a rent which should be calculated as the 
original rent, plus expenses of purchase, preparation, cost of 
