Comparison, with Germany. 13 
holdings, whereof less than 22 per cent, are under five acres, 
although over one acre in extent, while 45 per cent, are of 
the five to fifty acre class. Both together make 67 per cent, 
of the total against the German 94 per cent. 
But any bare figures of this sort leave erroneous impressions 
that should be removed, unless we consent to push the 
comparison further, for the starting points of the two sets of 
statistics differ. It is essential to remember that the German 
returns are swollen at the lower limit by their including all 
fractions of petty plots, down even to some which figure in 
the official returns as not exceeding the fortieth part of an 
English acre. Either, therefore, we must eliminate those which 
fall short of the acre limit at which our regular English statistics 
of holdings commence, or, for want of any better estimate, 
we must fall back on the looser and admittedly unsatisfactory 
figures of the special inquiries made in this country in 1886 
and 1890, and add these estimates to the later official record. 
In these inquiries, in one form or another, the petty parcels of 
land occupied as allotments and gardens, &c., were reckoned to 
have reached an aggregate of nearly 900,000 in round numbers 
for Great Britain, or nearly 800,000 if we limit the comparison 
to England as distinct from Scotland or from Wales. Such 
an estimate would raise the English holdings below fifty acres 
in extent to an aggregate of perhaps 1,050,000 units, against 
the German 5,252,000, or just one to five in place of one to 
eleven. If one dared therefore to add to the recorded hold- 
ings of over an acre in this country all the minor types of 
gardens and allotments of which we have any sort of know- 
ledge, we should stand possessed in England of a ratio of small 
holdings to total holdings very much closer to that which 
Germany can show, or 90 against 94 per cent. 
It is not a little curious that the effect of unearthing and 
utilising the old estimates of land held in England in plots of 
one acre and under one acre holdings, be they allotments or 
gardens or what not, and adding these to the areas with which 
alone our annual returns deal, exactly in what would appear 
to be the fashion abroad, would be so to alter the relative 
grouping of our statistics as to establish a claim — at all events 
until the old data are discarded as unreliable — to have more 
holdings in the very smallest category than even the Belgians, 
the exiguity of whose units of agricultural occupation is 
known to be extreme. I do not wish unduly to press this 
point, and no one is more conscious than I am of the difficulty 
of attaining certainty in our own country respecting the units 
of cultivation below the acre limit ; but when the case is argued 
against England on the ground of the small number of persons 
holding land in any fashion, I think the consequences of 
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