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2 The Place of the Small Holder in English Agriculture . 
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it is well this is so, for the more enthusiastic of the land 
reformers of the last decade of that century have received a 
somewhat damping account of recent efforts of legislation. 
The significant facts made patent by the Parliamentary 
Return of 1903 respecting the net results of the Small Hold- 
ings Act of 1892 left no room for surprise at the decision of 
the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to inquire anew into 
a subject on which the Parliamentry Committee of 1889-90 
suggested legislation. The Departmental Committee which, on 
the nomination of Mr. Fellowes and under the Chairmanship 
of Lord Onslow, and with the personal co-operation of the 
present Minister of Agriculture in its earlier work, has been 
sitting since April, 1905, had naturally therefore placed in 
the forefront of its topics of investigation the working of 
the Act which made so little show in the decade covered 
by the published figures of holdings bought or hired under 
its provisions. The Committee of 1890, it may be recalled, 
contemplated operations on a scale which may be measured by 
the provision it suggested of some five millions of money for 
advances to facilitate the establishment of a substantial addition 
to the numbers of the small holders of land in Great Britain. 
The mere suggestion of such a sum as conceivably applicable 
to an agricultural purpose on this side of St. George’s Channel 
aroused at the time no little interest. The harvest secured 
after ten years’ working was in strong contrast to the hopes 
of the legislators. Of the County Councils of England only 
five seem to have purchased, and three others to have hired 
land for subdivision in small holdings, and one only of the 
Scottish local authorities has accomplished anything under the 
statute. A total of 248 acres sold to 72 peasant proprietors, 
allowing an average holding of three acres and a half, and 
a further total of 374 acres let to 166 small tenants, can have 
made no perceptible addition to the 400,000 small holdings 
officially reported before the Act was passed, or to the 4,900,000 
acres of the “not exceeding fifty acre” holdings which were 
recorded as existent in the last decade of the nineteenth 
century in Great Britain. 
Whether, therefore, it was the fault of the machinery 
provided by Parliament, or whether it was the absence of any 
local demand, strong enough and sound enough to make itself 
perceptibly felt, for the increase of holdings of this type, it 
was quite time that a new investigation should be made not 
alone into the administration and efficiency of the statute which 
seemed to have done so little, but more widely into the local 
history of what had been going on outside of legislation by 
voluntary or co-operative action to promote the extension of 
the class of small cultivators. 
