Recommendations of Departmental Committee , 1906. 5 
within the limits of precedent, British or foreign, although not 
all of equal magnitude. Probably the new experimental efforts 
suggested for the Board of Agriculture will be regarded as the 
most novel of the group, although, as I have just indicated, 
the voluntary action of owners will be widely recognised as 
the readiest of all the forces to be summoned into action, if 
only Parliament will do its part in the matter and endorse the 
recommendations laid before it. 
In a country like our own, precedent counts for much. 
Where to make a beginning in the large experimental enter- 
prise suggested will be the question to be weighed. And there 
will be no difficulty in finding guidance on this point in the 
stories of witness after witness, where they tell how here, by 
natural process, small holdings have arisen ; how elsewhere, 
under irresistible economic conditions, they have decayed ; 
how in one place a State Board may be the effective promoting 
agency ; how in another an enthusiastic local authori^ have 
found the task within their powers ; and again, how owners 
have themselves succeeded with, occasionally, the most novel 
feature of the interposition of collective associations or 
syndicates holding and reletting small farms to qualified 
applicants. 
My purpose in this article is not, however, to cull a series 
of recorded instances from the Blue Book now issued. It is 
rather to prepare for such consideration as the conclusions 
of the Committee demand by clearing out of the way some 
statistical misconceptions which seem to have got hold of the 
public mind with reference to the actual place of the small' 
holder in the distribution of land at the present moment 
in this country, and the extent to which we may find already 
at work and in evidence examples of success and failure. 
There was a time not so long ago when it was customary 
to conclude that, whatever might be the experience of our 
Continental neighbours, the small holder was a non-British, 
or at least a non-English feature of our later agricultural 
practice, who required to be created, or re-created, as some 
readers of history will tell us, by the aid of the pattern and 
example of other lands. 
The better knowledge acquired by our developed agricul- 
tural statistics has largely removed this impression, and it is 
now seen that however prominent may be the position of the 
medium and the large farmer in England, there are all around 
us, in particular localities and under particular climatic and 
market conditions, no inconsiderable number of instances 
where land, in nearly every county, is held and cultivated in 
areas not exceeding fifty acres. It may well be worth while, 
therefore, to examine afresh these records before any new 
