92 
Smtill Holdings. 
and the evil effects of which they were unable to avoid or 
mitigate ; their small stacks of hay were peculiarly liable to 
injury from rain, and dealers would not therefore give such 
prices for them as were commanded by the larger stacks. In 
addition, the materials they required to purchase — seed, corn, 
manures, &c. — were needed in such small quantities that 
merchants would not sell to them at wholesale rates ; while for 
quantities of material under two tons in weight the railway 
companies charged nearly double the rates of freightage. They 
have been unable to keep sheep upon their limited holdings, 
and, in Hampshire, sheep -breeding was almost the only profitable 
department of farming which, until recently, remained untouched 
by the depression. Neither have they been able to take advan- 
tage of steam to lessen the cost of cultivation. 
It appears from this experiment that the advocates of small 
holdings of arable land, especially in such a district as the Chalk 
lands of North Hants, have yet to learn from stern experience and 
the fruits of hard practice the vast difficulties that militate against 
the realisation of their hopes. In other parts of Hampshire 
there are still living many people who remember how tena- 
ciously the hardy cultivators of small holdings clung to the 
land until they were literally starved off it, and there are many 
land agents of the old school who especially remember the 
unpleasant and difficult work they experienced in evicting the 
small tenants from their miserable dwellings to make way for 
the larger farms managed by men of education and capital, 
better fitted than they to cope with the intense stress of foreign 
competition. The larger farms produced at nearly double the 
rate of the small holdings which they replaced, taking into 
account the production of beef and mutton and the increased 
growth of corn resulting from the use of cake and other artifi- 
cial food. The small holders were much to be pitied that in a 
certain sense they lost their independence ; but the regular work 
that some of them obtained upon the large farms enabled them 
to enjoy comforts forbidden to them in their former condition, 
and certainly unknown to farmers of limited holdings like the 
Scottish crofters and small Irish tenants. But it should be 
remembered that, as has been shown, the consolidation of the 
farms and the employment of steam decreased the scope for 
labour ; and while some of the former small holders benefited, 
many of them were forced away. 
Success is undoubtedly as much a question of the man as of 
the conditions under which he labours ; but, upon the Stratton 
holdings, both the industrious and the easy-going, the man of 
business capacity and the man who lacked it, have together 
