10 The Place of the Small Holder in English Agriculture. 
To what extent the small holder in England to-day is or is 
not a small farmer onr official statistics cannot therefore 
enlighten ns. 
It is, however, not correct to allege, as is sometimes argued, 
that the existence of the many occupiers of land who are not 
primarily farmers, but who hold nevertheless, as a matter of 
fact, a large number of the units of cultivation, prevents our 
using the returns of holdings in this country as comparative 
data in making contrasts with the parallel returns, as regards 
size, of other countries. All international comparisons have 
difficulties of their own, but the difficulty in this respect, at 
all events, is not so great as it seems, for just the same thing 
occurs abroad as happens here, and as the latest Small Holdings 
Committee very properly remind us, the enumerated small 
holders of our Continental neighbours include many persons 
very largely engaged in other businesses than simple agricul- 
ture. It may be worth while to quote some examples of 
non-agricultural occupiers elsewhere. If we take the case of 
Germany, it is interesting to examine somewhat closely the very 
full and detailed tables of the last German occupation census, 
and note the extent to which occupiers of small plots of land 
in that country were first agriculturists and next something 
else, or first traders or working men and only secondarily petty 
farmers or residents on the land. 
There are no less than 5,559,000 units of “holdings” shown 
in the census of 1895 in Germany, but less than half of these 
were occupied by agriculturists working on their own account ; 
and even of those so working, one in every five pursued some 
subsidiary occupation. Industry, trade, commerce, and trans- 
port appear as commanding the principal part of the exertions — 
either as masters or as workmen — of not far short of two million 
occupiers of German land. Nor do these figures exhaust the long 
columns of other land occupiers, some of whom are primarily 
wage earners in agriculture and allied businesses, but others 
belong to other categories in the census. It may naturally be 
supposed that these cases occur most largely in the smallest sized 
holdings. In Germany, so small were many of the units that 
nearly three and a quarter millions of holdings were under 
five acres in extent. Now, if the professions of the petty 
occupiers of this grade are analysed, only about one person in 
six, or just 564,077 individuals, are shown as being agricul- 
turists really working on their own account ; and even of these 
one-fourth pursued a further and supplementary occupation, 
and thus did not live out of the land alone. Among the other 
holders of under five acre plots there were 613,596 agricultural 
labourers who held land as well as worked on farms. On the 
other hand, no less than 1,591,000 occupiers were primarily 
