16 The Place of the Small Holder in English Agriculture. 
these ratios were first shown in 1888. In the counties of the 
north and north-west less than half that ratio of owner farming 
appears to prevail. Taking these figures as a guide, there 
would not appear to be any advance, but rather, a definite 
decline in the practice of farming the soil directly by its 
owners. In the first year these statistics were collected (1888) 
very nearly 16 per cent, of the whole English cultivated area, 
against the present 13 per cent., was so returned. But too 
much should not be made of this movement which may, it 
is suggested, be largely due to somewhat better prospects in 
English farming and the readier letting of vacant farms than 
was the case in the earlier years of agricultural depression. 
On the degree of owner farming in different sized holdings 
we have no later information than was given in 1895, when 
the proportion owned in each group of holdings according to 
size was worked out ; but it is interesting to note that the 
ratio of owned land in the smallest sized holdings — those 
below five acres — was, in the year just quoted, practically the 
same as for the general average of the country, and was in 
excess of the proportion shown in the 1895 inquiry for any 
other grade of holding below 500 acres. In five to twenty 
acre holdings, the ratio quoted by Mr. Rew as his evidence 
to the Committee was below the general average, or only 
12 per cent. In the next grade of twenty to fifty acre 
holdings and again in those running from that area up to 
300 a®res the proportion owned by the occupier was below 
9^. per cent. In the larger holdings, over 300 acres, it reached 
a proportion very much beyond this, but the figures in the 
larger farms probably indicated not that more persons desired 
to farm their own land themselves, but that, as things were 
at that moment, tenants were more than usually shy of hiring 
farms. 
However, the small proportion of the small holders of 
England who actually do own their farms is now a well- 
recognised figure, and one to which the very latest foreign 
data offer a striking contrast. In the German census, taken 
in the same year as the English inquiry just mentioned (1895), 
nearly two-thirds of the land in the smallest grade of holding, 
up to five acres in extent, was land owned by the occupier, 
who might be, however, and, as I have shown above, very 
often was, not primarily an agriculturist, but practised some 
other calling. In the class still higher in the scale, as much as 
88 per cent, of the 41,000,000 acres so held in Germany was 
land owned by the occupier. 
In fact, the German position is the exact reverse of our 
own, for only 12’4 per cent, of the land in farms was wholly 
leased land. The French proportion of occupying ownership 
