14 The Place of the Small Holder in English Agriculture . 
applying the German method of reckoning to onr own condi- 
tions should be studied. 
The extent to which particular portions of England have 
to-day a multiplicity of small holdings of all grades, and held 
both by owners and by tenants, necessarily crops up in the 
latest Committee’s inquiries. Nor is it only in the recognised 
colonies of small farms which owe their start to more or less 
recent efforts that these conditions arise. I question if we shall 
find there a more curious instance of subdivision than that 
I quoted in my Statistical Society paper on the size of holdings 
in 1887. There, on the good authority of the late Mr. W. C. 
Little, I instanced a parish in the Isle of Ely of 11,000 acres, 
where the soil was owned by 179 owners, of whom sixty-five 
were stated to be farmers or gardeners, forty-one were engaged 
in trade or commerce, and thirty-two were labourers. There 
were 243 separate holdings or occupations, 47 per cent, of 
which were under an acre. In sixty-eight cases the properties 
were occupied by their owners. 
It is of course on the extent of land devoted to small 
holdings that a more legitimate comparison may be made, and 
here the prevalence of allotment holding or garden culture 
makes a less impression on the totals. Nearly half the farmed 
area of Germany seems to be devoted to holdings of under fifty 
acres, or 44 per cent., while France does not seem to place 
more than 28 per cent, in farms of this size, Denmark no more 
than 17 per cent., and England 15 per cent. 
Comparisons of the average size of holdings are often made, 
but on the strength of such figures as I have been commenting 
on above it may be well to pause before we use them to 
ascertain just how far down in the scale of land occupation 
we are prepared to go before we divide the total area by the 
aggregate number of units accounted for. I may be disposed 
to attach an undue importance to this feature of any attempt 
to compare the true place of the small holder in the agricultural 
economy of different states, but the point is one which I have 
repeatedly urged on the International Statistical Institute, and 
in the report which was laid before that body in Rome as long 
ago as 1887 by Monsieur de Foville and myself attention was 
directed to the difficulty. The German and the Belgian data 
seem indeed to begin at zero, and the holdings of the latter 
state, it has been said, include as units not only “ gardens,” 
but “ jardinetsT 
It is not, however, merely the nominal place and relative 
importance of the small holder that we must correctly appre- 
ciate before we embark on a new effort to provide for his more 
effective multiplication. The questions of what is his tenure of 
the soil he tills, and to what extent he owns his farm, and how 
