t 
12 The Place of the Small Holder in English Agriculture. 
which, is practically the definition in the Small Holdings Act 
of 1892 — it will be found that, so far as numbers are con- 
cerned, there is no English county in which the “ fifty acre 
and under ” occupiers of land form at the present time less 
than one-half of the total number of occupiers, and only nine 
in which these small holders are less than 60 per cent, of the 
total. There is one county indeed — the West Riding of 
Yorkshire — where there are more than three small holders to 
every occupier of over fifty acres. It cannot therefore be said 
that we have no experience to go on as to how small holders 
succeed or fail or what their relative position is with respect 
to the larger farmers around them. 
I have said that just two-thirds of all the English farms 
shown in the returns are small holdings of one sort or another ; 
but a closer examination of the scope of our annual returns 
shows that this is really an understatement of the case. 
These returns take no account whatever of the holdings of 
land below the acre limit, of which we have no recent 
record, whether under the loosely applied terms of allotments 
or gardens or plots of soil. The latest general inquiry into 
these still smaller units of cultivation suggested that such 
parcels of land already abounded between sixteen and twenty 
years ago, and though the classification was admittedly very 
defective — and there has been some indication in recent agri- 
cultural reports that the allotment demand is fully, and some- 
times even more than satisfied — there is no reason to suppose 
there are appreciably fewer persons interested in this way in 
the land than formerly. All such petty cultivations find a 
place in the foreign tables which we most usually contrast 
with our less exhaustive survey. 
There is such frequent misrepresentation of our English 
position in this respect that it is well at the outset of a new 
movement for increasing the number of small holdings to 
look into this particular consideration, which the form of our 
returns leads us sometiihes to overlook. And here again 
we find it useful to compare our own conditions with those 
of Germany. Germany, so far as occupied by farms, covers 
107,000,000 acres, and on this area displays 5,559,000 separate 
units or individual holdings. Of these, 58 per cent., or no less 
than 3,236,000, are under five acres in extent, and more than 
half of them are below fifty ares (or 1*2 acres) in extent. Yet 
another 36 per cent, of the German holdings lie between five 
acres and fifty acres ; so that a total percentage of no less 
than 94 per cent, of the holdings of that country are of the 
dimensions we regard in England as “ small.” The parallel 
English figures, accounting for less than one-fourth of the 
German surface, show on that area a total of 372,000 separate 
