Complexity of English Agriculture. 
7 
generalise from casually picked out cases. It is even worse to 
conclude that because this or that man has succeeded, and this 
or that man has failed, in one- particular set of circumstances 
or another, therefore a particular course of action may be boldly 
entered on ; or that an attempt should be made to regard the 
statements of a few individuals as typical enough to form 
ground for legislation rather than for the institution of 
further and closer experiment under varied conditions before 
any exaggerated demand is made on the public in any whole- 
sale fashion for setting up in business a new series of farmers. 
Nothing is more clear than what the latest Committee 
recognise, that the agriculture even of a relatively small 
country like our own is an extremely complex and varied 
business. What succeeds in one parish or one farm by no 
means necessarily succeeds in another, nor can enterprises of 
a special character, involving the production of a particular 
product, be without danger to existing cultivators multiplied 
at will, or attempted at all, without a very close scrutiny of 
the type of cultivator to be chosen and established by the 
public credit as a pioneer of the movement for more numerous 
and more intensively farmed units of cultivation. On this 
point apprehension is already apparent among the raspberry 
growers of Perthshire and the celery growers of Lincolnshire, 
lest a successful industry already locally established might be 
swamped by any ill-considered or over-done extension. 
On the question of the mere number of individuals who, 
as a matter of fact, pursue the role of a small farmer, we have 
many figures. As a rule, in statistical comparisons between this 
and other countries, we usually compare the British or United 
Kingdom figures with those of foreign political units ; but there 
is a danger in the use of certain data thus combined which 
I am anxious for our present purpose to avoid. I use, therefore, 
quite designedly, the term English agriculture when I ask 
how the small holder bulks in proportion to larger farmers 
at the present time, for the conditions of Welsh, of Scottish, 
and still more of Irish land holders, differ rather widely from 
our own, and our knowledge of the relative place of the small 
holder in these countries is, owing to a special feature of our 
existing returns, less conclusive and less accurate. Only in 
one part of the United Kingdom — Ireland — is the basis of the 
holdings return the wthole measured area of over 20,000,000 
acres. The 594,000 separate holdings, or the 549,000 separate 
occupiers recorded for Ireland — for we are given choice of two 
sets of figures here — would work out at an average of thirty- 
four acres per holding or thirty-seven acres per occupier, 
whichever set of divisors we prefer. But these calculations 
cannot be properly compared with the Welsh, the Scottish, or 
