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TO COLONISE ENGLAND

THIRD AND POPULAR EDITION.

THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE.

Discussions of Problems of Modem City Life in England.
Large Crown 8vo, cloth, SB. 6d. net.

CONTENTS.

I. REALITIES AT HOME. CHARLES F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.
II. THE HOUSING PROBLEM. F. W. PETHICK LAWRENCE, M.A.

III. THE CHILDREN OF THE TOWN. REGINALD A. BRAY, B.A.

IV. TEMPERANCE REFORM. NOEL BUXTON, M.A. and WALTER HOARE.
V. THE DISTRIBUTION OF INDUSTRY. P. WHITWELL WILSON, M.P.

VI. SOME ASPECTS OF THE PROBLEM OF CHARITY. A. C. PIGOU, B.A.

VII. THE CHURCH AND THE PEOPLE. F. W. HEAD, M.A.

VIII. IMPERIALISM. G. P. GOOCH, M.P.

IX. THE PAST AND FUTURE. G. M, TREVELYAN, M.A.

T. FISHER UNWIN.

TO
COLONISE ENGLAND

A PLEA FOR A POLICY

C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.
W. B. HODGSON

AND OTHERS

" Less the pleasure-ground of the rich ; more the
treasure-house of the nation."

Sir H. CAMFBELL-BANNERMAN.

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN

ADELPHI TERRACE
MCMVII

"Plenty of employment would be found if the land were made
accessible to the men who are willing and able to work it. There is no
task to which we are called more urgently by every consideration of
national well-being than that of colonising our own country."

Sir HENRY CAMPBBLL-BANNERMAN, Nov. 28, 1905.

" My practical experience of over thirty years is that small holdings
and allotments not only keep villagers on the land, but are and always
have been a financial and social success. With me they have succeeded
not only round an artisan town, but equally on the clays of North and
Mid-Bucks, on the chalk hills and valleys of South Bucks, on the light
lands and ordinary soils of North and Mid-Lincolnshire, and, best of
all, on the grand lands of the Lincolnshire fens."

-Lord CARRINGTON, Nineteenth Century ', March, 1899.

" I leave the districts where I have seen the men at work who are
fortunate enough to have acquired a stake in the land with a vivid
consciousness of how there is implanted in our agricultural population
a great love for the soil, and a capacity for making it yield its fruits to
the fullest. This love and this capacity I see only fully turned to
account when the man is working under those conditions which enable
him to reap the full benefit of his own industry. Wherever I go I find
a people hungering for that raw material on which alone they can use
their powers. Through the length and breadth of England the cry of
the people goes up, « Land ! Give us more land.' " -Report of Special
Commissioner i Co-operative Small Holdings Association.

" Back to the land. It is the storehouse of wealth ; Nature's
universal bank— a bank that never breaks and never dwindles, that
honours every draft when drawn by labour's hand. It is a moral, a
physical, a political, a national regeneration."

ERNEST JONES.

A SONG OF THE LAND

The Squire he sits in his oaken hall,
Two score servants in beck and call,
Five square miles inside his park wall —

Giles follows the plough to the workhouse door.

The Squire has woods and acres wide,
Pheasants and fish and hounds beside,
A stable full of horses to ride —

Giles follows the plough to the workhouse door.

The Squire belike is a Parliament man,
Making the laws on the good old plan,
Getting and keeping whatever he can —

Giles follows the plough to the workhouse door.

Giles's home is a ruinous shed,

The fruit of his labour a crust of bread,

Poor are his garments and rude his bed —

He follows the plough to the workhouse door.

Gileses wife a drudge is she,

His children are bred right bitterly,

A dog in the kennel more worth than he

Who follows the plough to the workhouse door.

Giles's son fares forth for bread,

By the glare of the city his steps are led;

He finds the slum, by landlords bled,

Leads, like the plough, to the workhouse door.

How long, O Lord, shall the people be
Aliens in their own country?
How long shall the Sqtrire from the park gate see
Giles follow the plough to the workhouse door ?

A. G. G.

CONTENTS

PA«S

INTRODUCTION . . •• ; ' - • • xi
By A. G. GARDINER

PART I

THE DISEASE
W. B. HODGSON

I. THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS . . 3

II. VANISHING ENGLAND . . 9

III. Two SHILLINGS A DAY . • 15

IV. WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON . . 22

V. MERRIE ENGLAND . . . 29

VI. FOREIGN COMPETITION . 35

VII. LITTLE LONDON . . -43

VIII. No ROOM TO LIVE . . . . 5°

Tii

viii TO COLONISE ENGLAND

PART II
THE REMEDY

C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.

I. IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS . . .59

II. PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL . . 68

III. A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM .... 75

IV. NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS . . .83

V. THE LAND OF GOSHEN . . . g2

VI. THE OLD AND THE NEW . . I00
VII. HOPE AND THE FUTURE .... I0;

PART III
TOWARDS A POLICY

I. "WHAT WE WANT" .
F. N. ROGERS, M.P.

II. THE LAND HUNGER . .^ ,
R. WINFREY, M.P.

CONTENTS ix

PAGE

III. THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS . * 130
ARNOLD HERBERT, M.P.

IV. THE LANDLESS LABOURER . . .135

E. G. LAMB, M.P.

V. A PARISH MEETING • < * v « . 140

ATHELSTAN KENDALL, M.P.

VI. "LA TERRE QUI MEURT" . . ,» .147

PHILIP MORRELL, M.P.

VII. SOME LESSONS FROM ABROAD < . . 153
LEVI LEVER, M.P.

VIII. DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY ". . .159
CORRIE GRANT, M.P.

IX. WHAT MIGHT BE DONE WITH THE LAND . 164

H. F. LUTTRELL, M.P.

X. THE VILLAGE TRAINING . . . .168

FREDERIC VERNEY, M.P.

XI. THE WAY OUT ..... 174
E. N. BENNETT, M.P.

XII. THE VALUE OF SMALL HOLDINGS . . 181
E. J. SCARES, LL.D., M.P.

XIII. THE RURAL EXODUS .... 186
H. R. MANSFIELD, M.P.

x CONTENTS

PART IV

THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY
SUMMARISED BY C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.

PAGE

I. THE DECLINE IN AGRICULTURE . . .197

II. THE SMALL HOLDINGS COMMITTEE . . 201

III. THE RURAL HOUSING COMMITTEE. . . 206

APPENDIX . . . . ,- 209

INTRODUCTION

BY A. G. GARDINER

NATIONAL health, accordihg to Froude, is in exact
ratio to the proportion of the people having a direct
interest in the soil.

Tried by this test, Great Britain, in spite of its
thousand millions of over-sea trade in 1906, is not
only not the most healthy of European countries : it
is the "tainted wether of the flock." There is no
other country in which so small a proportion of the
people have a direct interest in the soil. There is no
country in which the land and the people are so
completely divorced. In 1851 nearly two millions
of persons were engaged in agricultural pursuits in
Great Britain. In the interval the total population
has doubled ; but the number of people engaged in
the land has decreased by more than half. Nor does
the decay of rural England show any signs of being
checked. The latest returns issued by the Board of
Agriculture on this subject show that in the twenty
years 1881-1901 the number of people engaged on
the soil of Great Britain declined by nearly 300,000.
Here are the figures which tell how the agricultural
labourer is vanishing : —

England ...
Wales
Scotland ...

1881.
802,288
45,665

1891.
716,609

42,525
107,412
zi

1901.

34,566
93,590

Decrease.
241,152
11,099
42,376

x CONTENTS

PART IV

THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY
SUMMARISED BY C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.

PAGE

I. THE DECLINE IN AGRICULTURE . . .197

II. THE SMALL HOLDINGS COMMITTEE . . 201

III. THE RURAL HOUSING COMMITTEE. . . 206

APPENDIX . . . ,. ,- 209

INTRODUCTION

BY A. G. GARDINER

NATIONAL health, accordihg to Froude, is in exact
ratio to the proportion of the people having a direct
interest in the soil.

1881. 1891. 1901. Decrease.

England ... 802,288 716,609 561,136 241,152

Wales 45,665 42,525 34,566 11,099

Scotland ... 135,966 107,412 93>59° 42*376

xii TO COLONISE ENGLAND

It will be seen that the decline was more rapid in
the second decade than in the first, and that if the
same rate of decrease is continued for thirty years
more there will be no labourers left on the land.

The tremendous fact that emerges from these
figures is that we have become a wholly town-bred
population and that the stream of wholesome country
blood which has served in the past to vitalise the
cities is nearly dried up at the source. The story of
the nineteenth century in England is the story of the
depopulation of the country and the congestion of
the towns.

The twin fact is due to two causes — the industrial
advantage which we gained in the early part of
the century and the operation of the land laws.

The Napoleonic wars, in their final analysis, were,
like the wars which gave us India and Canada,
economic wars. Britain emerged from them mistress,
not only of the seas, but of the commerce of the
world. France, the only possible rival, lay shattered
and powerless, and no other country loomed on the
horizon as a competitor. The advantage which
the inventions of Watt, Hargreaves, Crompton and
the rest gave us were exploited to the fullest extent
by a nation which held, not only " the gorgeous East,"
but the whole world in fee. There grew up the
tradition that we were to be, by a sort of decree of
destiny, the workshop of the world for all time, and
that other nations were to be our hewers of wood
and drawers of water. The mass of the people had
small share in the fruits of this enormous industrial
development. Royal Commission after Royal
Commission was held in the Thirties and 'Forties
to inquire into the appalling conditions of the
manufacturing people which had brought the country

INTRODUCTION xiii

to the brink of revolution, and it was only when
the gates of our ports were flung open to the golden
harvests of the West that the people began to taste
some of the fruits of our industrial prosperity. A
new impetus was given to the life of the towns and
the drift from the countryside increased in volume.
More and more the destiny of England seemed
bound up with commerce, less and less with the
cultivation of the soil. The theory that England
was the workshop of the world and that the task of
other countries was to grow food for us seemed to
have the authority of a natural law.

But with the second half of the century came a
change, at first slight and negligible, but gathering
volume with each decade, until at the close of
the century we were faced with the fact that
every considerable European nation had become an
industrial rival. The long advantage which this
country had enjoyed had diminished and Con-
tinental countries, filled with youthful enthusiasm,
and starting with all the advantages derived from our
long experience, were entering the field of commerce,
not where we began but where we had arrived, and
were challenging us not only in their home markets,
but in the neutral markets of the world. Germany
took the lead, and every one will recall the resentment
with which we found a quarter of a century ago that
she had had the impertinence to trespass on our pre-
serves. That resentment was embodied in the scornful
phrase, " Made in Germany," and it is the basis of
the anti-German feeling that prevails to-day. But
Germany was only one of a multitude of offenders.
Austria and Italy, France and Russia, Spain and
Hungary, even far Japan, and, above all, the United
States, have each entered the field of industry.

xiv TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Together they have destroyed the theory of England
as the universal provider. We are witnessing, as
Prince Kropotkin has shown in his memorable
"Fields, Factories, and Workshops," the decentrali-
sation of industries — the building up of industries
side by side with the maintenance of agriculture —
and the establishment of the newer and sounder
theory that the modern state must be based upon
the concurrent development of field and factory.

The enormous commercial expansion of England,
in blinding us to this truth, has not been an unmixed
blessing. It has made us forget the land. We have
forgotten that the security of a nation depends, not
only on the number of its factory chimneys, but far
more on the number of its people directly interested
in the soil.

Thus it came about that this country had no
share in the revolution in agriculture which marked
the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century.
That revolution has touched every country in Europe
except Britain. It has spread from Denmark to
Siberia, from France to Servia. It has even given
birth to a new era of hope in Ireland. It sprang
out of the great agricultural depression which passed
over Europe thirty years ago and which left the
farming industry in this country largely in ruins.
It marked the breakdown of one system — the system
of individual, unscientific, and unorganised agriculture
— and the emergence of another, the system of
collective effort based on the application of science
and modern invention to the industry of agriculture.

" Government and co-operation," says Ruskin, " are
in all things the laws of life ; anarchy and competi-
tion the laws of death."

We have witnessed in the last twenty years the

INTRODUCTION xv

astonishing triumph of government and co-operation
as the principle of agricultural development on the
Continent. It is only in Great Britain that the laws
of death, anarchy and competition, are still un-
challenged in the field of agriculture.

Before asking why England should have had no
share in this vast and beneficent change, it may be
well to say a word on the subject of the change itself.
It began in Denmark, and that country is still the
most popular object-lesson in this connection. As
has so often happened — as is happening to-day in
Spain — it was political adversity that led the Danes
into the path of economic success. The war of 1864
robbed them, of the two rich provinces of Schleswig-
Holstein and turned their attention to the unculti-
vated wastes of moor, marsh and dune in Jutland.
The reclamation of these lands during the last forty
years and their conversion into one of the richest
provinces in Europe is one of the romances of fact.
Side by side with this work of reclamation there
developed the system of co-operation — Ruskin's laws
of death gave place to the laws of life. It was found
that individual competition was ruinous, and that
mutual co-operation was the secret of success.
Thirty years ago there was not a co-operative dairy
in Denmark. To-day there are over a thousand, and
the total imports of Danish butter in this country in
one year amount in value to something like ten
million sterling. One effect of this development was
the practical extinction of the Irish butter trade in
England. That trade, conducted on the old indi-
vidual, inefficient lines, could not compete with an
industry highly organised, " standardised," and con-
ducted on the most hygienic and scientific principles.
Ireland has since regained some of the ground she

xvi TO COLONISE ENGLAND

then lost, thanks to the work of Sir Horace Plunkett
and the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society in
inaugurating the co-operative system. Meantime,
Denmark extended the application of the co-operative
system to bacon-curing, eggs, bee-keeping, &c., with
results proportionately great to those achieved in the
case of butter.

The experience of Denmark is only representative
of what has been done and is being done in greater
or less degree in all the countries of Europe, in
Belgium equally with Germany, in Finland equally
with Italy, in Austria and Hungary equally with
France. The investigations of Mr. E. A. Pratt,
recorded in his books, " The Organisation of Agri-
culture " and " The Transition of Agriculture," are of
the utmost value in this connection. His conclusions
strike one as of less weight, for they are unfortunately
conditioned by his prejudice against State action, his
desire to show that private ownership of railways has
no adverse bearing on the interests of agriculture,
and by his apparent indifference to land tenure as a
factor in the case.

The development of the system varies in the
different countries according to the varying local
conditions ; but, broadly speaking, there may be said
to be three phases of this remarkable movement :

1. Education.

2. Co-operative purchase, handling, and sale.

3. Finance.

In the matter of education, Germany, with its
elaborately graded system of agricultural instruction,
is easily first ; but in each case the co-operative
movement is associated with serious attention to
technical instruction, in some cases under State
auspices, and in the case of Italy rendered by travel-

INTRODUCTION xv

,g professors whose duty it is to advise the local
•ganisations on matters of expenditure, to hold
inferences, and to introduce improvements and
.ethods of organisation.

Co-operative purchase, handling, and sale, has beet
eveloped in various ways ; but always with striking
iccess. In Germany there are something like four
lousand societies of one sort and another for
urchase of implements, manures, seeds, &c., or me
.reduction of agricultural commodities or finally
heir sale. In France the grouping of orders for the
mrchase of commodities by the various associations
f the Syndicat Central des Agriculteurs de France
re stated by Mr. Pratt to amount in value to
£8,000,000 a year. The advantages to the ind.v.dua
Vom this co-operative purchase are threefold (l)
vholesale prices instead of retail, (2) higher quality
3f goods, (3) lower railway rates. The advantages
from co-operative treatment and sale are not less
-onspicuous, though in this respect France is behind
some of the other countries. Finally, there is the
social amenity which issues from this business co-
operation. It is one of the most frequent explana-
tions of the decay of rural England that the life of
the country is so dull that the young peasant flees to
the town for human companionship. The co-opera-
tive movement on the Continent, however, has largely
modified this reproach against rural life. Through
business co-operation men and women are brought
into friendly relationship under auspices which ~
the interests of the individual the interests of al
the bitterness of religious and political differ
disappears before the humanising influence of this new
social factor. Co-operation, in a word, is not only
recreating agriculture ; it is helping to recreate society.

xviii TO COLONISE ENGLAND

In the matter of finance, the Raffeisen system of
Germany, local in its operation, and founded on the
unlimited liability of its members— a condition aimed
at securing that advances should only be made to
responsible and trustworthy persons — has been
most generally adopted ; but in Italy the resources
of the Savings Banks are placed at the call of the
Village agricultural organisations, while in Hungary
the Government have created a Central Co-operative
Credit Bank, the effect of which has been so remark-
able that by 1903 there were some 2,000 local co-
operative credit banks affiliated, the year's business
representing a turnover of some ^"3,000,000.

While this remarkable movement has been chang-
ing the whole fabric of Continental agriculture,
what has been the case in Great Britain ? Lord
Winchilsea's National Agricultural Union developed
into a merely political organisation on a Protectionist
basis and expired, and the excellent National Agri-
cultural Organisation Society with its affiliated
societies, last year had a turnover of only £221,524.
This has been hailed as " remarkable progress.** It
is, unfortunately, only convincing evidence that the
co-operative movement has yet to be born in con-
nection with British agriculture.

The fact is not due to the cause so commonly
advanced in its explanation — that is, the innate con-
servatism of the British farmer. It is due to the
conditions of British agriculture, which in turn are the
t of our land system. Co-operation, which
:s origin to industrial England, has failed to
take root in rural England for the same reason that
300,000 agriculturists — denied any career on the
land except that of a serf, and refusing " to follow
the plough to the workhouse door "—have vanished

INTRODUCTION xix

from the soil in the last twenty years. It has failed
to take root because, as the Prime Minister said in - '
his Raffeisen speech, "the land of England is the
pleasure-ground of the rich, and not the treasure-
house of the nation." The land has passed out of
cultivation, not because we have not a fertile soil, not
because we have not a suitable climate, not because
we are without a market. We have some of the best
soil in Europe, a climate superior to that of Denmark,
a market the richest and most abundant in the world.
Nor has agriculture broken down because the pro-
gress of industry has peopled the land too thickly
for cultivation. Belgium has a population of over 500
to the square mile ; Great Britain a population of 360
to the square mile. Belgium exports manufactured
goods to the extent of £9 per head of the population ;
the United Kingdom exports manufactured goods to
a considerably less value per head of the popula-
tion. Yet Belgium not only supplies its own dense
population with food but has a million's worth left
for export, while this country is fed with butter from
Denmark, Finland, Siberia ; eggs from Russia and
the Balkan States, Flemish potatoes, French salads,
Canadian apples, and New Zealand mutton. Mean-
while the country around our cities is a green solitude.
Take a journey in Hesse or Baden, through land
much of which has been reclaimed by the State from
a condition of marsh and waste. It is like travelling
through a hundred miles of market-garden. No
great towns ; but everywhere over the plain red-til'"*
villages, everywhere the peasant at work on hi: ittle
farm, everywhere the signs of a prosperous, frugal,
wholesome life in the open air. Then return by
Harwich to London through the green wastes of
Essex where never a man is seen tilling the soil, and

xx TO COLONISE ENGLAND

you will realise something of the enormous tragedy
involved in those figures of rural depopulation which
I have quoted.

The causes of the failure of British agriculture
have been admirably analysed by a German expert,
Dr. Hermann Levy, in his survey of " The Presen !
Position of English Agriculture." Asking why the
British farmer has not been able to keep in his own
hands the supply of butter, eggs, poultry, fruit, vege-
tables, &c., he declares that the cause is not to be
found in any advantages conferred by Nature on
foreign countries as compared with Great Britain. It
is due to the absence of co-operation for the produc-
tion of his commodities and for disposing of them.
This in turn is due, not to " the innate conservatism
of the British farmer," but (i) to the varying sizes
of the farms, which are difficult to organise on a
common footing ; (2), to the fact that, farmers here
being mainly tenants with insecure tenure, move
about from district to district and are consequently
less easily organised than a more settled agricultural
people with practical ownership of the soil they till ;
(3) to the increasing conversion of the land from
agricultural to sporting uses by men of great wealth,
who oppose the creation of small holdings because it
might detract from the beauty of the landscape.
Co-operative organisation of agriculture, in a word,
can only develop under favourable conditions of
tenure and cultivation, which do not exist in Eng-
land. The small holder, independent, secure, must
) the co-operative system, through which alone
agri ture can be restored.

it is the purpose of this book to indicate the nature
of the disease that afflicts English agriculture, to
describe the success that has attended the small

INTRODUCTION xxi

holding where it has been established in this country,
and to indicate the reforms necessary to give the
peasant the freest possible access to the soil. The
Act of 1892 was a step in the right direction ; but it
was timid and abortive. Only nine councils have
adopted it, and under its operation a beggarly 660
acres have been set aside for small holdings.

The most significant and satisfactory feature of
the articles is the essential Agreement of the various
writers, approaching the subject from independent
points of view, as to the means necessary " to
colonise England." Substantially, they accept the
policy outlined by Mr. Vaughan Nash in The Daily
News three years ago and subsequently developed in
an admirable series of articles in The Speaker^ under
the title of " Towards a Social Policy." It may be
useful briefly to summarise what seem to be the
broad conclusions of the writers : —

1. The Parish Councils should be endowed with
further powers (including compulsory powers) of
obtaining land on lease for Small Holdings. These
should be similar to those at present possessed by
the Parish Councils in regard to the establishment of
allotments, and they should include facilities for
purchasing land which shall be held in perpetuum as
parish land. There is general agreement that the
community, in establishing the small holder, should
not surrender its ultimate ownership of the land it
acquires. A practical freehold, but not an -^con-
ditional freehold, will meet all the small-? olden
needs without paving the way to a new monopoly
for future generations to grapple with.

2. The County Councils' powers should be en-
larged and strengthened. The machinery of the
Small Holdings Act of 1892 should be simplified.

xxii TO COLONISE ENGLAND

The purchase money of the would-be holder should
be reduced from one-fifth to one-eighth, and more
satisfactory arrangements for the advancement of
money for buildings, equipment, &c, should be
authorised. Finally, there should be compulsory
powers for the purchase of suitable land. " Shall "
and not " may " should be the note of any legislation
on the subject. The futility of the Act of 1892 has
shown that compulsion is essential to an effective
policy.

3. The establishment of a Central Body of Small
Holdings Commissioners. This is the keystone of
the policy. The Central Body should be the driving
power of the whole machine. It should have funds
at its disposal and power to issue Land Stock (as in
Ireland) on land purchased. Its functions should be
(i) to stimulate and encourage action by the County
Councils and Parish Councils, and (2) to purchase on
its own initiative suitable estates, equip them as
Small Holdings, and let them to small holders.

4. The organisation of the Small Holder. It fs
not enough to establish the small holder. To be
successful he must adopt the collective methods
which have revolutionised agriculture on the Conti-
nent. The Central Body should be charged with
the task of setting these methods in operation
through the three channels —

(a) Co-operative purchase, handling, and sale ;

(b) Agricultural banks ;

' ) Agricultural education and expert advice.

If we have limited the scope of these articles to

'-oblem of the small holding, it is not owing to

indifference to the allied questions of transit, &c., but

because it has seemed the most profitable course to

concentrate attention at the moment on the means of

INTRODUCTION xxiii

bringing together the manless land and the landless
man.

It only remains to be said that the articles have
appeared in The Daily News ; that they were com-
menced by the late Mr. W. B. Hodgson, whose
lamented death occurred in the midst of his labours ;
that the task was then taken up by Mr. C. F. G.
Masterman, M.P. ; and that the third section, consist-
ing of articles by members of Parliament represent-
ing rural constituencies is' especially valuable as
indicating the mind of rural England expressed at
the General Election a year ago. Mr. Fred Home
contributed some admirable articles to the series,
which are only excluded because they do not fall
into the scheme of this book.

Acknowledgment is due to the Co-operative
Small Holdings Society, and especially to Mr.
Charles R. Buxton, the chairman, Miss Jebb, and
Mr. W. A. Moore, the secretary, for much valuable
help.

PART I

THE DISEASE

W. B. HODGSON

THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS

" WE must colonise our countryside ! "

Such is the message of splendid daring which the
Prime Minister gave to the nation on the eve of
the greatest political struggle of our day. The
conquest of the land for the people will mean a
tremendous fight, but victory will bring the pas-
sionate gratitude of the poor, the toiler, the op-
pressed, and will secure the party of progress in
power for a generation to come. As Cardinal
Manning said, "The land question means hunger,
thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labour spent in
vain ; the toil of years seized upon, the breaking
up of homes, the misery, sicknesses, deaths of
parents, children, wives ; the despair and wildness
which spring up in the hearts of the poor when
legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most
sensitive and vital right of mankind."

What is the reason of the continuous desertion of
the land until, like a new Columbus, Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman is able to rediscover it as
a colony of great and fruitful promise for the
British people ? Why is it that in forty years,
while our population has grown enormously, the
number of people fed by the produce of our own

4 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

soil has gone down by 15,000,000? Why is it that
not merely wheat and green crops, but beef and
mutton, have been going steadily down, and that
the labourers employed on the soil have decreased
from two millions to one, so that there is but a
single man to nearly forty acres ? Why are the
people being driven to the towns to aggravate the
problem of unemployment?

It is in the hope of helping to answer some of
these very difficult questions that I am making a
short tour in the country.

I am beginning my tour at Honiton, the little
Devonshire market town famous for its ancient
industry of lace-making. Even in this winter-time,
even in the darkness, how sweet and gracious is the
country after the sultry, dusty, crowded town ! It is
five o'clock, and while tea is preparing I walk a mile
out into one of the Devonshire valleys amid which
the old town nestles. In the country five o'clock in
winter means Night. I find myself alone, the stars
overhead blazing in a great violet sky. As I
walk, these little sky-lamps twinkle amid the dim
tracery of the leafless trees, whose trunks, like fur-
clad winter voyagers, are thickly swathed in ivy.
The tall hedges are full of mystery, and seem
haunted by strange, watching figures. In the dark-
ness beneath sounds the tinkle of falling water, like
the bells of an elfin steeple. Like silvery mirrors
here and there shine the roadside pools.

Slowly a team of horses comes near, drawing a
vast tree-trunk on groaning wheels. A lantern
swings in front. In the darkness behind the teamster
cracks his whip with startling sound. He knocks

THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS 5

his pipe on the corpse of the old forest monarch,
and like a portent in the heavens there is a sudden
shower of blood-red meteors. Slowly the wagon
crunches its way into the silence. Far off in the
darkness is a slow, sturdy, regular footfall ; it is a
tired labourer walking home after his labour in the
distant fields. As his shadowy figure passes one
sees a grey sack thrown over his shoulders like a
shawl. e«

"Good-night," he says, half in greeting, half in
challenge to the unknown.

A gentle pattering of feet, and the home-coming
kine flit past, their long, dark shapes like boats
floating through the night. With feminine timidity
they quicken their pace in passing, and one raises
a voice of inquiry that sounds like the music of
a bassoon.

Now the road rises a little, and the eye sweeps
over a broad and lonely valley, the further side of
which lifts to a curving skyline, with here and
there a solemn clump of pines. Down in the
bottom is a ghostly veil of mist, and beneath it,
like an infant with the valley for its cradle, a
streamlet is crooning softly. Overhead a long,
dark cloud-form hovers, following the curve of the
valley and the stream and the silvery mist below.
How rich and soft and transparent is all this
shadowy night-colouring — the sepia of the wide
hillside that leans against the further sky, the
violet of the sky, the silver-grey of the stealing
mists, the ashen hue of the meadows ! You think
of town, with its yellow glare and crowded faces
distorted into goblin forms by inky shadows, and
what this great restful calm would mean to them.

But in all the valley, under the splendid arch of

6 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

the constellations, where are the hearthlights of men
that should shine in response to the lamps of
heaven? Glimmering faintly is a single cottage
light across the valley. And suddenly, close at
hand, there springs out from the gloom a Gothic
diamond-paned window illumined by a light behind
a red blind, on which the forms of geraniums are
silhouetted in black. The light is the flame of a
match ; you see it flickering with a slow, unsteady,
groping motion across the room, and you know
from the fluttering zigzag that a woman, toil-worn
and tremulous, one for whom the lamp of life is
burning low, is lighting up the cottage for the good-
man's return. The candle is found, the spluttering
light of the match makes a downward swoop, and
the almond-shaped candle flame burns up bright
and clear.

Alone these two lights twinkle in the valley,
alone under the widespread mantle of restful dark-
ness, in the great ocean of refreshing night air,
while in the cities men and women and children
crowd together till the very streets are heavy with
human breath.

Such is a Devonshire valley on a night in winter.
By day the loneliness, the desolation, the visible
blight which is creeping over the land are almost
awe-inspiring. The tillage of the land has ceased,
the fields have been allowed to lapse into "per-
manent pasture." Crops did not pay, because of
foreign competition, say the farmers. And so old
Mother Earth has been allowed to send up just
what she has pleased. Miles and miles of bare
brown fields are given up to coarse grass and

THE LAND AND ITS LONELINESS 7

thistles and molehills, with hedges that have not
been trimmed for years, ditches choked, and here
and there reeds and thistles and swamps that show
how soon "pasture" will slip down into mere
common.

I have just been visiting Churchstanton, eleven
miles out from Honiton, through valley after valley
of the kind I have described. At one point I stood
looking on a broad and once fertile slope, facing
the south, every acre of which not very long ago
used to produce its five-and-twenty or thirty bushels
of wheat. Twenty-two farm hands were then em-
ployed. Now the number has gone down to one
carter and a boy. And the land — well, it would
be a mockery now even to call it " pasture."
Blotched all over with patches of gorse, whose seeds
season after season are spread broadcast among the
grass, it is as though the land were cursed with
some dreadful eczema. It will take years to destroy
this pest — the roots of the gorse are so tough you
can hardly cut them with a knife.

" Barren land " perhaps some one may say.
" Barren land " may be the refrain when I mention
that the Rector of Churchstanton tells me that forty
labourers' cottages in this single parish have been
obliterated since he came here twenty-five years
ago.

But, fortunately for the reputation of the soil,
cheek by jowl with this gorse-strangled hillside that
scowls up at the sun are some cottages called "The
Encroachments," built by labourers themselves on
common land. Each in its own plot of fruitful
garden, built of good stone and mortar, and snugly
thatched by the owner, the cottages are a picture
of smiling prosperity. Even now, within a few days

8 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

of Christmas, marigolds and primroses and poly-
anthus are in bloom on the open flower-beds. And
kitchen vegetables are here, and fine fat poultry in
well-fenced runs, and firewood and garden tools
well housed, and every bit of each enclosure put to
wise and thrifty use.

I went and stood at the fence which parted one of
these little homesteads from the adjoining ''farm."
On one side is a pleasant garden, on the other putrid
moss and reeds growing in pools of stagnant water
covered with an oily slime.

On the one hand there was a beautiful example
of what man can win for himself from the ragged
and savage moorland with his own hands : on the
other the spectacle of the way in which land is
slipping back into wilderness and morass when the
labourer is driven away.

- t

VANISHING ENGLAND

THE Labourer and his brother the Horse are really
treated very much alike. Both are worked on the
land so long as they can produce two things :

A. Their own subsistence.

B. A profit for somebody else.

When they can only earn A, but no longer B, they
have to go.

It is just at this stage in the economic evolution
that a remarkable difference, fraught with much
significance, is discovered in the treatment of the
two animals.

When the Horse ceases to be a profit-yielder, there
is a quick and merciful end to his days. In death,
he can render one last service to mankind. His
bones are ground up into a manure, and scattered
to fertilise those long furrows of brown clods which
used to crumble under the tread of his patient hoofs.

With the Labourer it is different. His end is
neither quick nor merciful. It lingers long in the
grey alley of a distant town. Darkness, dreariness,
loved ones paling and sinking before his eyes —
what need to go on with the picture?

10 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

The Labourer is not even allowed, like the Horse,
to fertilise the quiet countryside whose every dell and
rose-bush he knew and loved so well. What can the
economists be about that this waste should have
escaped their attention ? Sentimental burial laws
take far more care of his poor shrivelled corpse than
society ever bestowed on the man while alive. He
was deprived of a cottage, of a bit of land to dig, of
his place on the farm, was cast utterly adrift. The
corpse, on the other hand, is hemmed in by coroners,
policemen, doctors, locked up in a cemetery with
great iron gates. It must not serve, any more than
the man that it was ; it must not be metamorphosed
into rose-leaves and golden fruit, and live in the sun-
shine again.

And yet is it impossible to conceive, in a vagrant,
irresponsible moment, of some happy land, with a
different edition, newly codified, of the Laws of
Nature, where a place might be found in the scheme
of things for the Labourer who could produce A (his
own subsistence), but not B (a profit for some one
else) ? For, mark you, the burden would not only be
lighter, but toil would be sweetened and strength
renewed by the joy of possession. The fruit garnered
in that ceaseless wrestle with Nature would be his
own — his own to make snug and warm the little home,
to buy some trifling rest for his careworn partner, to
pay for the bringing of roses to the pale cheek of his
fragile child.

The Labourer would then have that much-talked-of
thing, the " incentive to industry."

Why does the learned economist think it the best
"incentive" to have to dig six inches deep for a

VANISHING ENGLAND 11

master before giving a final push of three inches
deeper for yourself? Surely the best incentive is to
get all the fruit.

The Labourer, on his own land, would bring up a
strong, healthy, useful family of citizens.

He would produce the food our naval alarmists tell
us may any week be suddenly cut off.

He would provide the home market for which our
manufactures are languishing.

For each labourer settled on the land, and pro-
ducing food, an exchange of food for manufactures
would arise which would absorb one unemployed
person in the towns.

But here I am at Churchstanton, eleven miles from
the railway station of Honiton, and I have still to
tell the story of " The Encroachments." As I have
said, forty labourers' cottages have disappeared
utterly in Churchstanton during the last twenty-
five years.

The history of "The Encroachments" is both
inspiring and tragic. Formerly there were numbers
of little pieces of waste land dotted about the parish,
and many labourers settled on patches of the road-
side common and built tiny hovels in which to live.
It was a tradition in the district that when " smoke
would rise and water would run " from a cottage the
owner or builder was secure from molestation.

So unobtrusively, bit by bit, " The Encroachments "
grew up. A little patch of garden was taken in, a
stone wall built, a porch or lean-to shelter added.
Ragged turf gave place to the deep, rich mould of the
vegetable garden, poultry had their little run, there
were flower-beds and charming climbing plants. The

12 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

landscape became dotted with these little models of
rustic comfort and happiness.

In 1856 there came a solemn inquiry and the
enclosure of the waste by adjoining owners, on the
usual pretext of better cultivation and the " putting
to work " of the unemployed and idle. The cottagers
who had built on the common were allowed to stay
on paying a small rent to the rector.

When the present rector came, twenty-five years
ago, the churchwarden, a typical old yeoman, said,
" I think those rents ought to be raised." Not under-
standing the situation, the rector consented, but
later he found that the rents had been raised in some
cases as much as 400 per cent., though every penny of
the value of buildings and gardens had been created
by the tenants and their families.

In vain did he try to get his overseers and church-
wardens to reduce the rents again.

" These people cannot pay the rents ; they will
have to leave," he said.

" That is exactly what we want," said the church-
wardens and overseers, " We don't want these men
in the parish. They will only come on the poor-
rates."

The rector's spirit was up. He determined to
organise a rebellion.

" Don't pay these rents," he said.
And then a Seven Years' War raged in Church-
stanton.

The more stout-hearted of the cottagers followed
the rector's lead, defied the parish, and refused to pay
their rent. Fierce parochial magnates glowered
upon them, threatened them — all in vain. Eviction
notices were prepared by the overseers, endorsed by
the churchwardens, but the rector, faithful to his tiny

VANISHING ENGLAND 13

flock, refused to sign them. No rent was paid, and
the little cottages, with their trim and fruitful gardens,
bloomed like oases amid the wild, unkempt wilderness
of so-called " farms."

But in the meantime others broke down under the
constant official pressure. They could not make all
their living from their little plots. They were denied
the little casual employment which have made ends
meet. They had to go.

As a ruthless and savage warning to other
cottagers, the parish authorities broke down the
empty homes. Not one stone was left upon another.
They were used for mending the highways. To-day
the careless stranger who passes along these roads
with their picturesque, straggling hedges little guesses
that the stones which crunch with so brisk and
pleasant a sound under the wheels of his smart trap
were once borne one by one with infinite pains and
care and built into a cosy home by the labourer who
has now, with all his family, been driven away — who
knows where ?

I have just been standing on the site of some of
these vanished homes. I cannot say " ruins " even,
for not a stone remains. A little rectangle of cleared
land — maybe three-quarters of an acre — shows where
the labourer lived and loved and prayed, and his little
ones played and prattled. A lean, solitary cabbage
still struggles with the suffocating weeds.

All around is the desolate common, with its dark,
forbidding clumps of gorse, its gloomy thickets, its
sandy banks riddled with the holes of countless
rabbits. This is the land that in the year of grace
1856 — fifty years ago — was "enclosed " by our legis-

14 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

lators for its " better cultivation " and the " putting to
work " of the " idle poor."

Fifty years have gone by, and not a spade or a
plough has touched the " enclosure." But the " en-
croachment," the place where love and joy sprang up
from the barren earth under the spade of the cottager,
has been swept utterly away. Once more "legal
force, like a sharp harrow, has passed over the most
sensitive and vital right of mankind," bringing wild-
ness and despair over those poor hearts that have
gone away into their lifelong exile.

And now for the tragic ending of the story of
" The Encroachments." One day one of the remain-
ing cottagers died. His son, quiet and respectful,
came and asked the churchwardens and overseers for
a transfer of the tenancy.

They refused ! One more of these obnoxious
centres of independence should vanish, one more
family of possible workhouse inmates should be
swept away.

The rector remonstrated. There were bitter words.
" You are ruining the parish," said the churchwarden.
And he went angrily away, and died of an apoplectic
stroke. Then, strangely enough, the opposition to
the rector broke down, and the rents were reduced
all round to a fair average. So now we have pros-
perous arreHfcrtile enclosures and cottages on the
one hand, l$p these terrible devasted patches on
the other.

Ill

TWO SHILLINGS A DAY

DRIVING in the cheerful winter sunshine along these
Devonshire lanes, I pass through the village of
Upottery, and soon come to four cross-roads, where
a doleful ruin meets the eye. The rotten roof-
timbers of a dismantled cottage stick up against the
sky like the ribs of a big whale at the Natural
History Museum. Like sightless eyes the windows
stare out upon one. But it is clear that not long
ago the place was kept with loving care and atten-
tion. Carefully pruned rose-bushes still grow in the
wide garden, the yellow jessamine blooms, the
espalier-trained apple-trees form a neat natural
railing that must have taken years to train. Ever-
greens trimmed to whimsical shapes, flower-beds and
vegetable garden show how busy the tenant must
have been.

"Ah, yes," I am told, "that's where Fiddler Jim
lived. He was a shoemaker, a clever old man, who
made and mended for folk living miles around. A
wonderful fiddler he was, and he would be at every
wedding and dance in the parish. He was mighty
fond of his garden — it was just a picture in the
summer-time. Roses he loved above everything ; he
had them everywhere."

16 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

" And why is the place all in ruins ? "
" Well, the old man died, and the cottage wanted
a good bit of doing up, so they just let it go."

At the end of a long day's tramp I turn down in
the gloaming into a side road that brings me to the
village of Weston. Almost the first cottage I come
to has a yawning cavern about a yard wide in the
corner, just under the overhanging thatch. Its torn
sides show that the walls are made of stiffened mud.
An abundance of this building material, in a semi-
liquid state, lies about, and by the side of the cottage
a few branches covered with thatch form a small
" linny," or sloping shelter to keep the rain off the
pails and other domestic utensils for which there is
no room inside.

To the door at my knock comes a pale, fragile old
lady in a faded lilac sun-bonnet. Her fine forehead
is white as marble. White also her cheeks, with
bones that stand out painfully. They have been
carved by a Sculptor whose knowledge of skeleton
anatomy is dreadfully precise. Her large eyes have
a startled, timid look. Very quietly she answers my
questions about the cottage.

" The thatch was done up about a year ago. That
piece of wall under the corner should have been done
then, but they have never sent to finish it."

" Are many cottages here built of mud like this ? "

" They do not call it mud, they call it * cob.' "

" Do you get rain in the bedroom ? "

" No, but the wind blows in terribly. I have not
been used to this kind of thing all my life. When I
married my husband was a farmer himself, and I
brought him some property, but it all went by

TWO SHILLINGS A DAY 17

degrees. We carried on a small business, but the
profits on that went to keep the farm going, till at
last, when our family of six little ones were growing
up, all was gone, and my husband became a labourer
himself. In those two little bedrooms under the
thatch we and our children — eight of us — all slept,
and I have had all the six of them down with
measles there at once."

Just then the wife of the cottager next door came
home with a pail of water—they have to carry their
water from the farm — and sat down at the door of
her dark little living room to peel potatoes for
supper. No oven had she to bake anything, not
even a kitchen range or stove. Just a few iron bars
and bricks propped up on the open hearth.

Ten shillings a week with a cottage, or I2s. with-
out, is the regular labourer's wage, I found. The
stockman and the carter get more. Cider-making
used to give some extra employment, but this year
that has failed, because there has been such a demand
from the jam factories that most of the apples have
been sent away. Apples are the basis of jam — the
pulp or sweet mass which dilutes and cheapens the
various kinds. It is only a fable which tells of
turnips and carrots being used. This year a shortage
of apples has deprived the Devonshire labourers of
the little extras which came to them for cider-
making.

" But how do you live on los. a week ? " I ask.

" Ah," says one of my two auditors, with a bitter
laugh, " it is not living, it is starving. Many a time
I have had to search the place for something that
would sell to get a penny or two to buy a herring."

" But surely there are some things free ? You get
milk, perhaps, in a dairy county ? "

18 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

But no. I actually found that my poor old lady
of the lilac sun-bonnet, when she and her husband
and six children with measles were sleeping under
the thatch above, could only get milk by paying
threepence a quart for it to their employer !

" And your six children ? " I ask. " Are any of
them working on the land?"

" No, thank God ! If I had twenty not one of
them should work on the land. I would sooner
see them dead."

A few paces down the road one passes away from
the village and out on to the dreary highway. A
little wooden gate in the tangled hedge lets one
through into a wild thicket. In the middle stands a
piece of wall with a window — all that is left of a
cottage. I scramble up a hillock formed by the
ctibris. Great blocks of the "cob," or dried clay, are
still intact. The rain has softened the surface into a
slime on which one slips awkwardly about. Clumps
of tall reeds and tough stalks of withered grass spring
out of these broken fragments. There is a hole
where wasps had had a nest last summer. One can
poke one's umbrella deep into the stuff of which the
old cottage was made.

Everywhere in the district cottages are vanishing,
as the cultivation assumes a lower and lower type,
and degenerates to mere " permanent pasture." The
small villages are ceasing to exist. The thatcher, the
blacksmith, the general shop disappear with the
cottager. At Broadhembury, half a dozen miles
from Honiton, a score of cottages have gone, and the
general tradesman with them. At Stockland, in the
Axminster Union, a dozen cottages have gone in the

TWO SHILLINGS A DAY 19

last twenty years, nearly all of them burnt down.
The place has quite a reputation for fires — for a long
time the insurance companies charged it extra. The
fires are always mysteries, but whatever the cause
the cottages never get replaced. There are half a
dozen so dilapidated that I am afraid they will get
burnt before long.

Few though the remaining labourers be, the farmers
seem to want them fewer. ,There is a good deal of
parish land or " poor " land, which the labourers have
a right to. Some of them are quite miniature
farmers ; hold up their heads in the world, and when
they do a bit of piecework are able to ask their own
price.

That is the grievance of the farmers. "These
piecework men," they say, " won't work for less than
half a crown a day." The economical farmer wants
his odd man for a few days in the year at a florin a
day, and to leave him to shift for himself all the rest.

Two shillings a day is almost sacred in Devon-
shire as the labourer's hire. If you hear of a man
getting 143. a week he always adds, " But I work
Sundays."

Twelve shillings a week, less 2s. rent to the farmer
for the cottage, is almost the universal condition.
But the labourer has generally a quarter or half an
acre of garden, and if he and his family can do with
a bit more he can often get an odd corner of a field
for potatoes. He has extra money for harvest and
haymaking, and such extras as cider, and occasional
milk, apples, turnips, and perhaps a rabbit out of the
thousands shot.

In Stockland you may see a curious survival of the
times before the New Poor-law.

20 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

A labourer there, earning the regulation I2s. a
week and paying 2s. for rent, is actually getting 2s.
from the parish.

" Why do you give him that ? " I asked one of the
Axminster Guardians.

"Well, he has half a dozen children and he has
recently lost his wife."

" Yes, but he is not out of work."

" The Guardians thought it was a hard case, as he
had no one to look after things but a girl of fifteen."

" Did he ask for this money ? "

" No " (thoughtfully), " he did not ask for it. But
we thought we ought to allow him 2s. from the
parish, because he has no wife."

So determined are the farmers that the labourer's
hire shall not increase that they are going back to
this shallow device of seventy years ago ! Incident-
ally, of course, this deprives the poor man of his
vote.

At Westhill Ottery there are twenty or thirty small
holdings reclaimed from the common by labourers,
like those at Churchstanton, only in the present case
the enclosure was made with the permission of the
lord of the manor, on ninety-nine year leases. Sturdy,
honest, respectable, these men keep a cow, a few pigs,
and some poultry, attend the markets, make their
six or seven pounds of butter a week, and look the
whole world in the face.

• • • « •

It is clear from the cases I have given that trie-
Devonshire labourer can do well wherever he has his
own bit of land. Year by year his garden improves,
his home becomes more pleasant and substantial.
His little collection of the gear of the husbandman,

TWO SHILLINGS A DAY 21

of live stock and furniture, is added to, because he
has no fear of a sudden removal. Even an allotment
is a palliative, but if the cottage is his own and the
land enough to keep his family through a poor year,
then he is as contented and as happy as you could
wish.

But these parishes are few and far between. Most
of the labourers are hired out to individual farmers,
and live in the farmers' own cottages. They are
overcrowded to an almost inconceivable extent. Half
a dozen, and even eight and ten in a family, will be
huddled in two or three beds tucked under the
thatch. When a new baby comes, why, one or two
of the elder boys or girls must go — there is no help
for it. It is this, and not the destruction of cottages,
which causes the great exodus to the towns.

" I had to turn him out," the father will say of his
elder boy. " It was not decent." And so the lad
goes up to town.

But, indeed, there is very little to keep the young
man on the land. The old happy village life of
" Merrie England " has utterly withered away. The
maypole and the morris-dance, the laughter of the
harvest home under the yellow moon, the carol-
singing of Yuletide, the games on the village green,
where are they all ? What wonder that the labourer,
educated as he now is, cannot bear the monotony of
it all ? Why even the churchyard ghost has vanished
and the bored squire gone away. We must do more
than plant the labourer out in squares of arable soil.
We must give him more than land and freedom. He
must have some form of association, of access to the
greater things of life. Never again can the soil of
England be cultivated by that bovine and exclusively
British creation, the " yokel."

WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON

" AH, I thought it would come out at last. You're
one of these agitators."

The speaker drew a long whiff of smoke, and
regarded me with a solemn look of challenge. It
was the market-day ordinary at the "Dolphin"
at Honiton. Our good host had presided at a table
laden with roast and boiled, at which sat thirty
Devonshire farmers, hale and apple-cheeked. And
now the cloth had gone, the boxes of tobacco and
long churchwardens were littered round, and some
were drinking cider, while one or two of the younger
ones, pretending to a knowledge of town, had
ordered a Benedictine or Chartreuse.

I had innocently inquired why the hedges in
Devonshire were so wide, and this it was which
had revealed to the assembled company my dark
and dangerous character of an " agitator."

I soon found that Devonshire is very shy about
these wide hedges. One farmer will tell you that
the soil is so prolific that the hedges grow wide of
themselves, another that they are made wide to keep
cattle from trespassing. Hard pressed for an
argument, the farmer will tell you that the hedges
keep the fields warm, like bedclothes tucked in at
night.

WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON 23

The Devonshire hedge is a marvel of luxuriance.
First, it has as a foundation a broad bank of earth,
fully as wide as the road — say, fifteen to twenty feet.
At either side of the bank runs a close-set outer
hedge, and between the two is a tangle or thicket of
plants from which spring occasional trees. Even in
this winter season these hedges are most picturesque,
with their beech-plants all covered with gold-brown
leaves, their tall, red-berried holly, their lace-like
fringes of oakfern and hart's-tongue, their tree-
stumps crowned with green like a church-font on
Christmas morning.

The real secret of the Devonshire hedge, that strip
of brake and coppice which surrounds the farm and
the field, and makes the country so picturesque to
the eyes of the visitor from town, is — Rabbits !
Under the overhanging gorse and bracken and fern
the steep bank of bare soil is riddled with great
holes. The so-called "hedge" is an enormous
honeycomb of winding passages, like bomb-proof
entrenchments in a besieged city, where the rabbits
live and conduct their nightly raids for forage. For
an individual farmer to aim at clearing his land
of this pest would be like Mrs. Partington with the
mop that was to sweep back the Atlantic. Let him
snare and snare and snare, it will be of no avail.
While there are succulent roots and luscious grasses
to be had on his land, and underground rabbit-
palaces in the famous Devonshire hedge, more
rabbits will come. I have heard of a whole com-
munity of bunnies migrating fifty miles in the night
to an attractive feeding-ground.

And so the farmer, despairing of raising crops,

24 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

depends more and more on dairying, as the rabbits
cannot eat his cows. He even looks to the rabbits
themselves to help to pay the rent, and a grand
rabbit-catching will sometimes make no mean
addition to his balance in the bank. On a single
farm in the South Molton district they held a
rabbit-catch not long ago which lasted a fortnight, and
brought in fourteen thousand rabbits.

Surely, this is a counsel of despair! To let
land degenerate into sour pasture is bad enough, but
to treat it as a mere rabbit warren is to abandon all
hope of profitable culture. So thought a Scottish
farmer, of the patient, industrious, thrifty Northern
type, as he looked at the sad spectacle of these
fat Devonshire lands, with their warm summer
sunshine, all running to wild waste. He took a farm
near Honiton, and he tried to farm it in the good,
clean, laborious Scottish way. Eight thousand
rabbits were taken on his farm in a few days.

But a new and strange difficulty confronted him.
His horses and cattle seemed suddenly to have gone
mad. They broke through the Devonshire hedges as
if they were so many cobwebs. Nothing would
confine them to the fields. And he found that the
"ground game," as it is called, had so poisoned the
soil and the grass that the poor beasts could find
nothing to eat. They could not touch the foul
herbage, and broke away through sheer starvation.

" Why," the reader will ask, " do they not burn and
plough and destroy these rabbit-shelters, set up
neat fences, and add scores of acres to their
fields?"

Well, it would be a tremendous work, involving

WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON 25

lots of capital, and if one farmer did it his crops
would still be liable to incursions from his neigh-
bour's rabbits. Besides, the landlord would not
allow it. Everywhere I go I find that the landlords
are in favour of increasing, and not diminishing,
the number of cities of refuge for ground game.

One farmer I have just met cultivates 215 acres of
land at Snodwell, paying £100 a year in rent. He
has been there twenty- four years, and has brought up
ten children, all of them working like slaves to pay
that £100 a year. Now the land has just been sold
for £1,8 2 5, or less than fy an acre. The new owner
is going to let the farm for £140, and he will reserve
twelve acres of coppice, from which legions of rabbits
will be able to raid the crops of the next tenant.

" I don't know what I shall do," says the farmer,
whose lease is just up. "I know one thing: I
cannot pay that £140."

In another case, where a small farm has fallen in,
the landlord has broken it up into three portions,
and added it to the holdings of other tenants, whose
capital is all too small even for their existing land.
The farmhouse, of course, goes; a farmer's family,
servants, and dependents are removed from the soil.
Cultivation goes down a step. But again the
" coppice " is reserved by the landlord, this time in a
corner position, in which it commands three large
farms. The fewer the farms, the greater the stretches
of land without human inhabitants, the better the
landlord is pleased.

I have shown by examples how the labourer is
being driven off these broad acres of Devonshire
by the lapse of cultivation and the want of cottages.
But there is a similar exodus of the class above,

26 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

the farmers themselves and their families. The case
just mentioned of a farmer who has brought up ten
children on the land is one in point. Every one of
these has had to work, as their father put it, literally
like a " slave." Even the miserable pittance of the
labourer has not fallen to their lot.

Here is another case, also within a few miles
of Honiton. A farmer has three grown-up sons
and three grown-up daughters working on the farm.
They are clothed and fed, it is true, better than
the labourer. But not one of them has any money
wages, anything to save. Not one of them has had
any education beyond the barest elementary
school rudiments. Of the science of farming they
know nothing, and they are utter strangers to the
marvels of modern culture. Those boys and girls
have had their youth wasted in endless drudgery
to make ends meet and pay the ever-recurring rent.
They have not even their father's rule-of-ttiumb
acquaintance with farming methods. And yet if
they were to desert him, the old man would break up.
It is only this free labour, " slave " labour one might
well call it — held together by the desperate bond of
a despairing family affection — that keep his head
above water.

" Why do they pay more rent than they can
afford?" some one will ask.

And, indeed, a noble earl, who is one of our best-
known landowners, put the thought to me a few days
ago with somewhat cynical frankness.

" Don't give it as coming from me," he said, " but
farming pays ! For every farm we have to let there
are at least seven applicants."

WIDE HEDGES IN DEVON 27

But what is this " paying " ? Here in Devonshire,
at all events, it is the reckless bid of the farmer who
knows that he must have land or perish. It is
the coining into landlord's gold of the wasted lives of
the son and daughter who see their parents sinking
into want and helplessness. Of such a case I have
just heard the sad particulars. For two generations
the old man has been struggling on the same farm.
In spite of his children's labour he has gradually got
behindhand.

And now, at seventy, he says, " A good season
would put me right." Poor old man ! He does not
realise that if in the prime of his years he did not
secure the fruit of that wonderful dream-season, that
glorious golden fruit-time for which the farmer hopes,
he is not likely to do better with one foot in the
grave. He is just living on hope. With old-world,
rusty machinery, he is fast going down. But he
clings to his farm with desperate tenacity. Well he
knows that if ever he leaves he will never get
another — could never afford to stock another. So
he must go on by privation and drudgery raising
a rent out of all proportion to the present produce of
the soil.

There is another influence in Devonshire that tends
to keep up the artificial rents paid for farms. Young
men and maidens here, in spite of the sinister
experience of their parents, have a constant ambition
to found new families. A friend has just told me
this story : —

"A young couple had been courting," he said.
" Their fathers, being old neighbours, put their heads
together, and her father came to me to ask about

28 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

some land they thought would do to set the young
folks up.

" ' You know such-and-such a farm ? ' he said
to me.

" * Yes/ I said. ' Three tenants in two years.'

"But they must have it. They hear there are
other applicants. So the young man takes posses-
sion before the lease is signed and with nothing
done, and he pays a quite reckless rent. The land
has been starved, and he has no capital to improve it.
And so things go from bad to worse."

The artificial scarcity of farms is made worse by
the practice of cutting up a small farm when a lease
runs out and adding it to the larger farms near.
The farm of " Round Ball," near Honiton, once a
thriving homestead, is now let by auction annually,
in lots. The farmer and his family and all the
labourers are gone, and the house itself is tumbling
into ruins.

V
"MERRIE ENGLAND"

" To colonise England."

Lover of our dear native land, what a task is this !
Look hard at our great voiceless wastes, our lean
countrysides, our sodden ditches, our crumbling
hamlets. Look, and think while you look of the
scene as it might be : clean thatch and blossoming
orchard, frolic of little zephyrs in the corn ; ring of
anvil and merry patter of mill-wheel, the fierce music
of the sawpit on the green, the romp of happy,
brown-faced children ; the fair bosom of Earth our
Mother clad once more with a delicate and beautiful
garment woven of the rich and subtle things of Life ;
gladness and laughter and song, labour and rest,
sweet sorrow and sweeter love.

In very truth this is no question of a few sleek
Acts of Parliament, or spider-web theories of a
School of Economics, or turning of hordes of white-
faced unemployed on to these Sphinx-like acres
whose secret demands the labour and wisdom of a
thousand years.

It is the calling forth of a New Life ! It is the
essaying, in this little island of ours, of a fresh
Creation. When we confront this stupendous task,
our ears catch some faint echo of that awful music

30 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

that sounded when the Spirit of God brooded over
the dim primeval waters, and breathed the breath
that became a living soul.

Indeed, this, and no less, is what we mean when
we glibly talk about restoring " Agriculture." What
we have to replace is a living human society of
cultivators on the great wilderness outside our towns.
The word "agriculture" is just one of those vague,
abstract polysyllables which politicians and econo-
mists will persist in using to get rid of difficulties.
It includes the notion of the " field " or " acre," and
the digging or "culture," but nothing about the
human beings who are to till, and not only to till,
but to live. Yet it is this human element that
baffles us with its endless complexities, that con-
forms to no rule, and will not be summed up in a
formula.

If it were merely a question of raising vast quan-
tities of vegetable produce from the soil I have no
doubt it could be managed with a mere trifle of
human supervision. One readily conceives of a land
with steam ploughs and traction engines and self-bind-
ing reapers careering about like the monsters in Mr.
Reid's " Prehistoric Peeps " ; of carrots and lettuces
and Brussels sprouts springing up in the night like
spectral armies under the stimulating glare of count-
less electric lamps, of machine-mixed soil, full of
moisture and warmth and ferment, spread thick over
hills and valleys, to defy the frost and keep up relays
of new crops all through the winter.

All this would only leave us worse off than before.
Mountains of cheap food would only give us towns
bigger and more crowded, with more disease, more

ENGLAND" 31

physical deterioration, more ebb and flow of
" employment " — mostly ebb !

A complete human society, then, is what we must
seek to establish on the soil — its members knit
closely together by ties of kinship, and neighbourly
esteem, and friendly co-operation, and the exchange
of the multitude of small services that go to make up
the sum of life. This must be the ruling principle
in all our endeavours to re-establish our fallen agri-
culture. No phenomenal abundance of the green
herbs of the earth, no vast accumulation of flocks and
herds, no stupefying totals of produce hauled round
the globe by the power of steam, must divert our
attention from this primary consideration of the
building up on the land itself of a virile, contented,
industrious, and stable people. The harvest was
made for man, and not man for the harvest.

'• A truism ! " you will say. But if so, it is one that
has been most wofully neglected in our national
policy.

To be really efficient and successful, this society or
family of cultivators must be as numerous as the
land will support in comfort. Instead of thinking
how to get rid of men and replace them by machines,
the constant aim should be to increase the population
profitably employed on the soil.

Why, I have just met a farmer who rejoices that
he can save so much labour on a field and still
keep up the crop by using artificial manure. The
labourer is to be replaced as a fertilising agent by
burnt bones and the dung of foreign sea-birds!
Apart from the bad husbandry of this, it shows how
the land is regarded merely as an instrument of

32 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

immediate profit, utterly regardless of the people
who want homes and an opportunity to live and
work.

The importance of having the largest possible
population on the land is not a question of sentiment.
It can be shown clearly in terms of mere pounds,
shillings, and pence. A healthy, productive people
engaged in the fields is a nation's truest wealth. It
is always thrifty and a financial support in emer-
gency, as was the French peasantry in the dark times
after the war. It is a nation of strong citizens whose
rooted attachment to the soil would make a conquest
by a foreign invader almost hopeless. Every great
commander has recognised the impossibility of a
conquest of citizens. The Boer War showed the
desperate resistance which may be made even by a
thinly scattered population. Then, again, such a
community of cultivators, thickly planted on the
land, with growing crops everywhere in being and
maturing at all seasons, is, apart from its own
resisting power, the best of all bases for a defending
or retreating army. It does away with the most
difficult of all military problems, that of supplies.

Observe, I am not in any way defending war.

I merely point out that, from a military and
economic point of view, a well-populated rural area,
with a food supply always ready and always growing,
is in itself a substitute for many of the preparations
for defence upon which such immense sums are
expended by the State. It acts (i) as the most
powerful deterrent to invasion, (2) as a ready means
of organising emergency forces, (3) as a base of
supplies for regular troops.

Precisely the same considerations apply to our

"MERRIE ENGLAND" 33

naval defences. Every one knows that the great
work of the Navy in times of public anxiety is to
convoy the vast food supplies we draw from abroad.
A food supply within the ring of our coastline is
worth many millions of outlay on ships. At any
time it might avert panic, riot, and financial, com-
mercial, and industrial collapse.

Let us never forget that only six weeks' food, at
any given moment, stands, between us and actual
famine. Even the most meagre home food supply
would give an immense increase of stability at
enormously reduced cost.

So much for the value of a healthy agricultural
population from the point of view of our present
burdensome national defences. But such a people,
wedded to the land, would be the nursery and
training ground of strong, useful citizens. It would
be the " stock " of the nation, infusing new vigorous
blood into all other departments of the national life.
It would be a remedy for the dreadful physical
deterioration which is alarming all our most sober
thinkers. It would stem the terrible tide of insanity
in our towns.

" England is overcrowded," one hears.

But this certainly does not apply to the land. In
Great Britain we have an area of 56,000,000 acres,
and setting aside towns, moors, mountains, railways,
forests, &c., we have just over 30,000,000 acres given
to food-raising for man and beast. The population
of this agricultural land is seven and a half millions,
or one person to four acres. Food is raised for
17,000,000, or rather more than a third of our
population. Prince Kropotkin has shown that it

34 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

England were cultivated as well as Belgium is on
the average, food would be raised for 37,000,000, or
nearly our whole population. This would mean
2,000,000 more men employed on the land, or a total
additional agricultural population of nearly ten
millions.

And these ten millions would depend upon the
mechanics and tradesmen of the towns for their
supplies. Such a home market would make the
little percentages of trade from such and such
colonies and territories, about which we hear so
much, absolutely insignificant.

Millions of new workers would be needed in towns
and villages to meet the wants of this new colony of
ours, safely ensconced within our own coastlines.

There would be no longer any unemployed !

In these few rough arguments I have shown,
I trust, the paramount necessity of regarding the
problem as one of " colonising," not of mere culti-
vating. We have to thank Sir Henry Campbell-
Bannerman for that illuminating word.

It may still be said that though this great change
might pay the nation, it would not pay the individual
— that foreign competition makes it impossible.
That it would pay the individual as well as the
nation I hope to show when examining the great
masked economic interests, which, like giant
magicians, have long been at work, wounding our
agriculture to the very point of death.

VI
" FOREIGN COMPETITION "

THE people of Britain have a very real interest, an
interest of life and death, in this question of the use
which is being made, or rather, not being made, of
the great wilderness that lies at their doors, out in
the darkness just beyond the twinkle of the street
lamps. The grinding expense of militarism, the
dreadful curses of the maddened crowd of the work-
less, the clamour for new markets, and more new
markets, at the remotest ends of the earth, the cease-
less building of great cities for the insane, which we
call " asylums," the horrible dwellings where the poor
sleep heaped on the floor, the bloodless army of
emaciated children trooping wearily to school, with
crumbling teeth and failing sight and feeble brains,
the woman toiling through the night that she may
have a crust to soak in water for her babe — do not
all these things speak of the Land ?

But we have to do with a practical question. The
agricultural population, instead of multiplying and
growing more of the food which is the nation's life-
blood, the stimulus to every healthy activity, are
leaving the land, and the land is going out of cultiva-

36 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

tion. There is no dispute as to the facts. Here are
the official figures : —

1885. 1905.

Acres under wheat 2,478,318 ... 1,796,995

All corn crops 8,392,006 ... 7,094,232

Green crops 3,521,602 ... 3,077,042

Grasses under rotation 4,654,173 ... 4,477,518

Number of cattle 6,597,964 ... 6,987,020

Sheep 26,534,600 ... 25,257,196

Two million acres, one acre in every eight, gone
out of cultivation in twenty years! Not merely
corn, but green crops also.

If you say, " Oh, now we produce meat, not corn,"
then look at the figures as to live stock. Sheep have
become fewer by a million and a third, or one in
twenty. Cattle have increased by one in sixteen,
but have not kept pace with population, which has
grown by one in ten. The increase in cattle is not
due to meat-raising, but to the town dairies, because
so far we have not learned to import fresh milk.

To the twelve million people of Britain who never
get enough to eat, this going out of cultivation of the
land is a dreadful thing. The million and a third
of acres of corn land that have vanished since 1885
would have fed seven million people, whose daily
labour in return would have been a perpetual en-
richment to the country.

Why are the people leaving the land ? We must
not forget that if farm work is naturally repulsive, if
it leads to poverty and wretchedness, we cannot
expect a whole population to make slaves and
martyrs of themselves even for the public good.

Now, the reason why they go away, the reason
why the land is wretched and distasteful to them,

"FOREIGN COMPETITION" 37

is not that there are too many people on it, but
too few.

Robinson Crusoe lived on an island. It was a
fertile island, just as Devonshire is fertile. But he
met with the most tremendous difficulties, because
he was alone. When he found and planted that
priceless handful of barley, all the birds of the air
came as volunteer reapers the moment his back was
turned. When he had spent months in chiselling a
boat out of a giant cedar, he found he could not
move it the few yards to the shore. He was baffled
at every turn because he had only one pair of eyes
and one pair of hands.

The more people you get to work in one place, the
more you increase the power of each. The lonely
Devonshire farmer is a Robinson Crusoe. His farm
is a Crusoe Island. True, it is not surrounded by
sea, but if the smoke of your neighbour's homestead
is a couple of miles away across the fields, he is not
much use to you when you need a helping hand or a
little advice.

Think of all that is lost by big, widely scattered
farms, as compared with little ones where the farmers
work almost shoulder to shoulder. Think of it, if
you like, as a mere question of money profit. The
farmer with the big farm has his stock, his buildings,
his manure, at a central point. His dung must be
carted over rough, heavy land to fields, perhaps, a
mile or two away. And every horse eats up as much
of the produce of the soil as would feed a married
couple and two or three children. Implements, seed,
feeding stuffs must all be carried about over immense
distances.

The most trifling errand, to supply a sudden need
for man or beast, will mean a drive of miles to the

38 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

nearest shop. There is no telegraph, no telephone,
no electric car humming its busy way along the
country roads from village to village. There is no
quick parcel post to enable him to develop a trade
in little profitable things, such as eggs, cream, honey,
vegetables, or fruit with the towns. Even letters are
generally dropped in a rickety box at the roadside,
and have to be sent for when some one has time.

If a machine wants repairing it may be days before
a man can be got to do it, and his double journey
and the loss of time will cost the farmer dear. The
thatcher and blacksmith and tinker are getting more
and more rare, because there are not enough people
to keep them at work.

On these scattered farms nothing is ever at hand.
You can't get anything done in time to be of any
use. The land is never under the master's eye.
Tramp about the fields never so much, and still mis-
chief will be done long before he sees it. There are
not enough eyes watching the land.

All the countless little exchanges of service be-
tween neighbours, which cost nothing but are worth
their weight in gold, are lost when the cultivators are
separated by such distances.

The result is that the farmer is not a business man.
He keeps no books. He does not know which parts
of his business pay. He takes no account of all the
little things, the " save-alls " which would cost little
in labour and bring in a golden return. There are
sunny walls, abundance of stable manure, about the
homestead, but he never tries small crops which could

" FOREIGN COMPETITION" 39

be watched from the kitchen window and sold in the
towns. He never tries to sell things to his neigh-
bours. I have just been in to a little public-house at
four cross-roads. They had no tea — "the teaman
has not called this week." "Cocoa?" They had
no milk.

" But," I said, " there is a big farm across the way."
" They would not give you milk. It's all set up
for the day."

" Give me a jug," I said', and I went and got some
fine, frothy milk and an invitation to call again. But
no one had ever thought of a farmer's wife selling
milk. •

" Why don't you grow corn ? " I asked a farmer at
Chard.

"Oh, we only grow a little to get straw for the
cattle. The corn itself does not pay with this foreign
competition."

Now, there are several things to say about this.
Corn has gone up 50 per cent, in the last ten years.
The Manitoba farmer got 55 cents a bushel at the
elevator in 1894; now ^e Sets nearly 100. The
farmer here gave up corn as a bad job ten years
ago, and has apparently not really thought the matter
over since.

" Foreign competition," indeed !

Ten shillings out of the twenty-seven or twenty-
eight received by the British farmer goes in rent.

A pretty handicap with which to start against the
competition of the free land of Canada.

But will it be believed that the British farmer
actually gets four or five shillings less than he
might do because he is in such a hurry to get to
market ?

40 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Here is a diagram showing the weekly corn prices
in 1905 : —

BRITISH WHEAT f> R. I C €T S : l&OS

Look at that tremendous drop of prices in August
and September?

What does it mean ?

Why, the British farmer, poor fellow, pressed for
his rent, ignorant of market methods, is rushing to
sell his corn.

In addition to paying IDS. a quarter to his land-
lord, he loses 55. more by a forced sale to raise the
rent itself.

And then he talks about " foreign competition " !
Why, he does not get half the price that is paid cash
down to his Canadian brother. Lucky for him if he
had not that steam thresher, and had to keep men
with the flail threshing all winter.

He would get 53. a quarter more for his wheat.

On his lonely farm, with no busy society of culti-
vators round him to give him ideas, the farmer just
drifts on. With a pathetic longing for some com-
munication with the outer world, he wastes two or
three days a week in going to markets, where he has
nothing to sell, and meets others just like himself.

Out of the " Dolphin " window here I saw a

"FOREIGN COMPETITION" 41

curiously instructive group of three. One was a
farmer of the old type which I have been describing.
Slow, thoughtful, with that curious, anxious light
they have in their eyes, his bronzed and wrinkled
face haloed in iron-grey whiskers, he was talking to
a younger man, full-cheeked, booted, and spurred,
with smart Chesterfield and shiny tan-coloured leg-
gings. A few days ago this old farmer was seen by
a visitor standing on a heaped-up cart of mangels,
tossing them one by one 'into a shed, while half a
dozen labourers, waiting to be taken on, sat on a
fence smoking their short black clays, and watched
the old gentleman doing the work any one of them
would have undertaken at two shillings a day.

This farmer priced his own labour at two shillings
a day ; yet he pays £600 a year in rent !

The younger man is of an altogether more modern
type. He is a farmer, too, but he not only goes to
two markets a week, but shoots two days and attends
hunts on two others. Both unbusinesslike, in op-
posite ways ! Who can wonder the land is going
down ?

The third man was a splendid figure, a Breton
peasant from Roscoff, tall, broad-chested, smiling,
bearing on his shoulder, like the spies of Joshua, a
great pole, from which depended immense strings of
onions. He had come all the way to Honiton 'to
sell them. But at Roscoff the little farmers are
crowded thick on the land, they nurse the soil like a
baby, grow rushbanks to shelter the beds, and by
their close communication learn so much that they
can even cross the sea to market produce which they
carry on their backs. And here were these Devon-
shire farmers haggling over the price of onions with a
man who pays £$ an acre rent, and then has to

42 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

travel hundreds of miles at his own expense to
market. This is " foreign competition." Foreign
wits, foreign industry, foreign intelligence, the result
of a brisk, lively communal life, as compared with
our society of Robinson Crusoes who come from
their lonely farms and stand all day idle in the
market-place !

VII
"LITTLE LONDON"

AFTER Devonshire, Norfolk !

Norfolk, with its silvery broads, its sunlit cliffs
aflame with poppies, its rich plains standing high
above the sea, its splendid churches, grey and stately
and serene, their great towers seeming to shed over
the labours of the husbandman a protecting spirit
coming down the ages with its promise of fruitfulness
and peace.

I have come, however, not to enjoy, but to under-
stand. And if any one wishes to realise what the
" rural exodus " means I commend him to Norfolk,
and especially advise a ramble through the forty-
eight parishes of the Erpingham Union, stretching
across from the coast at Cromer and Sheringham to
North Walsham.

Here, near the small village of Corpusty, about
ten miles inland as the crow flies, I discover a hamlet
named "Little London." I admire the grim satire
of the rustic who invented that name. He harboured
no illusions about " streets paved with gold."

One of the cottages in " Little London " is in-
habited by an old man named Goldsmith, formerly

44 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

groom and gardener to a local clergyman, now nearly
eighty, and living on 33. 6d. club money, 2s. from
the parish, and what he can grow in his garden,
which with the cottage costs him 2s. a week rent.

Let me try to tell you the kind of cottage it is.
The little kitchen is about four paces by three, and
it is the only living and cooking room for the old
man and his wife, and a grown-up son and daughter.
The daughter is consumptive, and sits all day long
before the fire. The window does not open, the little
room quickly gets unbearably hot, and the only way
to get fresh air is to open the door. In a frosty wind
this, of course, means that in a moment the hot air
is blown out, and the room goes down to freezing-
point.

" If the door is opened we are perished," says
Mrs. Goldsmith.

And her shivering daughter, with the constant
painful cough, bears out the statement.

The floor of the kitchen is of bricks, and full of
hollows. On a rainy day the water comes in streams
down the stairs, which are entered by a sort of cup-
board door near the fireplace, and the kitchen is then
a series of little lakes.

" Before lighting the fire in a morning," says Mrs.
Goldsmith, " if it has rained in the night I have to
scoop up the water into a dustpan, and throw it out
of the door."

I asked permission to inspect the upper part of
this interesting cottage. As I went up I saw the
muddy tidemarks on the wall that showed how the
rain came in to the stairs. The space above, exactly
big enough to hold three beds, one for the old couple,

"LITTLE LONDON" 45

and the others for the son and daughter, was about
as well protected from wind and weather as if it had
been a birdcage. The lead window was in such a
dilapidated state that sundry efforts to tie it in place
with string had been of no avail.

Over the beds the bare tile roof let the wind in
everywhere, and the painstaking labours of the old
lady, who had stuffed the cracks in the roof with
rags and brown paper, were not sufficient to prevent
one seeing the sky. The' plaster partition at the
head of the beds was only held up by repeated
paperings, and bulged out like a balloon.

" I am afraid some windy night it will come down,
and smother us in plaster," said Mrs. Goldsmith.

In winter this upper storey is as cold as the outside
air. The family, and especially the invalid daughter,
are afraid to go upstairs to bed out of the hot
kitchen.

An ingenious plan is adopted to prevent the rain
from wetting the beds. For a long time Mrs.
Goldsmith noticed that one of her sons, who has
since left, had a very bad cough. She also noticed
that the bed used to be very wet.

" It's those night-sweats," she said to herself.

But one day she happened to see that the rain was
dripping on the bed from the roof. By placing pans
and other kitchen utensils on the bed in suitable
places she caught the trickling water and kept the
beds dry.

I find this plan is well known in Norfolk. I have
found two other cottages where it is adopted, though
in many cases the water comes in in such a way that
it cannot be caught.

Of course, the sleeper has to lie very quiet in bed.
If he overturns the pans he is worse off than ever.

46 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Still, with practice, and especially if the pans are
firmly placed after the sleeper has settled down, a
good deal of water can be kept from soaking the bed.

" Why did you not insist on having the place done
up before you came in ? " I asked.

" We came in the day the last tenant went out,
and were glad to get in anywhere at all. There was
no time for repairs."

" Little London " is reeking with infamies of sani-
tation, but the single case I have given must suffice
as an example. Let me now introduce you to a
different type of human dwelling - place. Near
Felbrigg, on the Norwich Road, my eye was caught
by a railway carriage without wheels, near a large
farm-house.

"What's that?" I asked.

" Oh, that's where the labourer lives. The railway
company sells these old carriages at £6 apiece, and
some of these farmers buy one to put up a labourer.
It comes cheaper than a cottage."

Walking up to the carriage, I found it was an old-
fashioned third-class car, originally with five com-
partments. Two of these had been made into the
bedroom, where the labourer, his wife, and three
children slept, the other three compartments having
been knocked into one to serve the purposes of
kitchen, drawing-room, library, study, dining-room,
&c. The bedroom floor is always wet in rainy
weather. As for the kitchen, it has a stove, oven,
and stovepipe going up through the roof. In such
a small place if the windows are shut it is roasting
hot when the oven is on, and if the windows are open
the place is like an icehouse in a minute.

"IJTTLE LONDON" 47

No wonder the wife is rheumatic and the children
always ailing. Twelve shillings are the wages of the
labourer, and for his £6 mansion he used to pay a
shilling a week rent, but now he gets it free as part
of his wages.

At Southrepps I come across a cottage on Lord
Suffield's estate occupied by^a labourer, his wife, and
their family of three. Both living-room and bedroom
are on the ground floor. The leaden window, like
the one above referred to, has rotted away so that it
might almost as well not be there. The bedroom,
where the father, mother, and two children sleep (the
eldest son sleeping in the outer room), is just big
enough to hold two beds, with a few inches of gang-
way between them. One of the incidental effects of
the cramped space of all these poor cottagers is that
they have no room to put anything away. It is
difficult to see how they find room to undress, or
where to put their clothes at night, unless they heap
them on the bed and sleep under them. But they
literally have no room to put things away. When
one thinks how many kinds of clothing are only
needed for certain exceptional occasions or seasons,
and how things for occasional use will keep as good
as new if only neatly put away, it does seem hard
that the labourer should be compelled to allow his
few poor garments to go to wreck because he has not
room for a chest of drawers or one or two trunks.

But that is not the worst trouble in this particular
cottage.

" Just stoop down, sir, if you please, and feel the
floor."

48 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

I do so. Plunging my arm down into the dark
space between the beds, for there is not room to see,
I find my knuckles sinking into what feels like a bed
of wet moss.

" It's the water that rises through the floor. You
may mop and mop as much as you like, but there is
always more. The people that used to live here
covered it all up thick with sacks. But that doesn't
seem decent like. So we put three thicknesses
of carpet down. But lor', it might as well be
bare."

No wonder one hears of rheumatics. Fancy
stepping out barefoot on such a floor on a cold
winter's morning !

The reason why the bedroom is practically a well
is easy to see. The garden outside slopes upwards
from the wall of the cottage, and drains right into its
foundations. There is no channel to intercept the
rain-water and keep it from soaking through.

The well is in the centre of the garden, a little way
up the slope. It is a circular, brick-lined pit, thickly
grown inside with ferns, mosses, and other plants.
It is quite a pretty sight to look down and see all
this greenery. But necessarily all the withered and
decayed vegetation drops down into the water. A
brown sediment falls to the bottom of the water
drawn for drinking. It has not a foul taste, but it is
bound to be unwholesome in the summer.

At the risk of offending squeamish readers, I feel
bound to mention one other point. The privy is a
ramshackle structure over a cesspool a little higher
up the slope of the garden. The boards of the seat
are so decayed and gnawed away by rats as to be
full of holes and crevices, and in imminent danger
of collapsing.

"LITTLE LONDON" 49

" Whenever one of the children goes up there I
am afraid it will fall through altogether," says the
mother.

This is bad enough. What I saw at " Little
London," and forebear to mention, was worse.

VIII
"NO ROOM TO LIVE"

IT is well for some of these Norfolk cottages that
there is a " rural exodus." Otherwise some of them
would burst !

I have just been looking at some tumble-down
little cottages at Corpusty, so absolutely rotten that
the bricks have got eaten away by the weather, and
the mortar stands out. But the most deplorable
thing about these places is their microscopic size.
The living or ground-floor room in one or two that I
looked at had a kind of washing copper built in the
corner, which seemed to take up nearly half the space.
There was just room for the goodwife to walk round
in the L-shaped remainder.

The pitiful result is that the poor people have no
chance of keeping anything. Walking up a muddy
lane I found that some of them had small sheds, with
rickety, moss-covered doors, half eaten away by wind
and weather, where they harbour a few of their
belongings for which there is no room in the cottages.
A dilapidated perambulator, a few bits of carpet,
would be stacked up with other oddments, gradually
perishing for want of protection from the weather.

Thus the want of a little more cottage room not
only means foul air, overcrowding, violent alterna-

"NO ROOM TO LIVE" 51

tions of heat and cold, but the loss of all that domestic
and household gear which in a well-ordered family
goes on accumulating all through life. Opportunities
occur of picking up things which will be useful by
and by, and thus a little storage room will mean that
the labourer toward the end of his days will be well
dowered with all the comforts of village life. Wealth
will have come to him free, because he has been able
to seize opportunities — to store the hen's feathers,
which will make pillows for his old age, to keep the
bits of finery which will serve to deck his children's
children, and so on. But these tiny cottages mean
that nothing can be kept, there can never be an eye
to the future, there is no encouragement to thrifty
management and the making of a permanent home.

Here are a few instances of the number of
inhabitants crammed into the cottages of the
Erpingham Union. Mr. Tuddenham, the Sanitary
Inspector, found at Bodham, not far from Shering-
ham, thirteen people sleeping in two small attics —
parents and eleven children of both sexes, from
twenty-five years old downwards. At Roughton
a most respectable family — two parents, one grand-
parent, four girls, aged twelve, ten, five, and two, and
five boys, aged twenty, eighteen, sixteen, fourteen,
and seven — slept in two small rooms. At Thorpe
Market six people slept in a room nine feet by seven
and a half. At Northrepps nine people slept in two
small rooms, at East Runton ten people in two small
rooms, at Hanworth twelve people in two small
rooms. Besides the parents, there were daughters
aged twenty, eighteen, sixteen, and five, and sons
aged twenty-two, fourteen, eleven, nine, three,
and two,

52 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Remember that two rooms in these cases never
means two rooms approached separately from a land-
ing. One is entered by a ladder-like staircase from
below, and the second from the first, generally, as
I have seen for myself, without a door between.
Indeed, there would be no room for a door to open.
Think how you would decently apportion those two
rooms among that family of twelve.

In a cottage at East Runton not only did a family
of seven sleep in two small rooms, but the inspector
adds the remark, " Visitors taken in the season ! "
At Felbrigge, where I saw the railway carriage
dwelling, the inspector found eight people living in
a single bedroom. There were many other cases in
which nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen people
slept in two small bedrooms.

In spite of this terrible overcrowding, which goes
on unchecked from year to year, the number of
cottages is yearly going down. At Roughton I found
that four cottages have gone out of use in the last
four years. The young labourer who told me this
was a most intelligent young man, and his eyes
flashed as he described the humiliations and diffi-
culties that his class have to suffer merely in seeking
a place in which to live. At Aylmerton ten cottages
have gone in the past few years, at Beckham seven,
at Bodham five, and so on right through the Union.

Most of the cottagers are too timid to tell their
case. They are fearful of being turned out, and dread
the sanitary inspector and his cautions about over-
crowding.

And, indeed, whither can they go ?

At Overstrand I visited a house where ten people
had been reported as sleeping in two bedrooms.

" It's not so bad now," said the wife of the cottager

"NO BOOM TO LIVE" 53

" Father's dead, and one of the little ones has been
taken, so we are only eight."

Poor body, I suppose she thought that if a few
more died the offended authorities would at last be
propitiated.

" Why," it may be asked, " is not Part III. of the
Housing Act put into force ? Why not petition the
County Council for an inquiry with a view to the
building of more cottages ? "

That is just what the Erpingham Union did. Over
ten years ago they tried to put the Act in force,
without success, but in 1902 the evil had become so
acute, that they again applied to the Norfolk County
Council for an inquiry. The letter was simply
acknowledged, and twelve months passed. Then the
County Council said, " You must name one parish
where you say the need exists."

The effect of this, of course, is not only to make
the provision of cottages for all the forty-eight
parishes an interminable matter, but to throw all the
expense on a tiny area which may consist of only a
couple of farms. By preventing the whole Union
from co-operating the County Council makes a
sufficient scheme an intolerable burden to the
selected parish.

However, the Union were not to be daunted.
They named the parish of Aylmerton. The County
Council decided in 1903 to grant an inquiry, but it
has not yet been held.

The law is very humorous in these matters.
Before an inquiry could be held the Union must
prepare plans and specifications of the cottages they
propose to build, indicate what land will be suitable,

54 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

estimate its price, and the expense of water supply,
and so on. All this costs a great deal of money.
But the Union are denied the power to spend any-
thing at all until the holding of the inquiry which is
to determine whether cottages shall be erected or not.
Thus the law cannot be put in force.

The Union authorities naturally cannot enforce the
law against overcrowding unless there are cottages
enough. Already they have had to receive into the
workhouse families able to pay for a cottage, but
unable to find one.

"The thing is quite simple," says one of the
greatest landowners of the county to me. " Is a
labourer going to pitch muck for twelve shillings
a week without amusements ? I wouldn't."

" The labourer is better off than ever," he goes on.
" He has milk from the farm, which he never got
before. It is true we have a man in the workhouse
because he cannot get a cottage. But why? No
one will let to him, because his children are dirty and
destructive, and they break all the windows. Other-
wise he could get plenty of cottages."

The " plenty of cottages " I have certainly failed to
see. But as I am invited to go and see the cottages
of my informant, I make a railway journey to another
part of Norfolk, and find one or two really substan-
tial and convenient little houses, each with three bed-
rooms, kitchen, and sitting-room. The father of the
family in one case is bearing water from the well,
while the boys, home from school, are hoeing in the
half-acre garden with desperate vigour, but not much
apparent result.

However, I walk on to the village green, an idyllic

"NO ROOM TO LIVE" 55

picture, with its vast trees and pretty little thatched
cottages, with their pretty flower gardens. Into one
of these I enter, clean and tidy and well kept, but
before the boys " went off" there were eight people
sleeping in the space above, with their heads tucked
under the sloping thatch.

"We had to get the room divided into two, for
decency's sake," I am told.

Next door there was the same overcrowding, even
on this model estate.

As to the water, the people are afraid of it. There
are ominous tales of typhoid.

"The fact is," the landlord had told me, "it is
medicinal water, sulphuretted hydrogen — just like
Harrogate ! It is good for them !"

But the villagers think otherwise.

PART II

THE REMEDY

C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.

IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS

SOME have survived through all the evil days, from
the time when the land was in the hands of those
who worked it. Some have been deliberately con-
structed, through the effort of Parish Council or
County Council, or the energy of one man or a
group of men determined to break through the
tendency towards consolidation. And some have
arisen almost by chance, through the character of
a village or the opening of some particular oppor-
tunity which has been denied to the less fortunate.
And of these last is the famous Winterslow experi-
ment, where in a remote village in Wiltshire, far from
the world and with few of the recognised conditions
which guarantee success, one of the most interesting
of modern attempts at land colonisation is just
coming to a satisfactory conclusion.

We drove out from Salisbury on one of those
radiant autumn days for a seven-mile ride over the
Downs. At first the way led between tall trees,
with glimpses between of the yellow stubble, and
the land all parched for lack of rain. The road
wound upward, opening far distances. The trees

60 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

fell away, then the marks of cultivation. The chalk
appeared, with the scanty soil above it. At last
even the hedges ceased, and there was nothing in
all the horizon but the wide earth under the wide
sky, and the white roads winding over the brown
hills.

After many miles of this landscape a line of trees
appeared crowning a long crest. We descended
through plantations of juniper bushes, then up
through a kind of cutting in the hillside resembling
nothing so much as an ascent to a mediaeval strong-
hold. The low tower of Winterslow Church ap-
peared, and the first houses of the village. Beyond
the village stretched the great woods of Winterslow
and Norman Court, which are still full of the memo-
ries of Fox, and Sheridan, and Hazlitt, and the men
of a hundred years ago.

Here in Winterslow has long lived a race of men
of independence and vigour. A religious revival
of some years back had helped to promote thrift
and sobriety. There were small holdings in actual
working before Major Poore's experiment com-
menced. And many of those who came into it had
already some savings which they were prepared to
put into the land.

In 1892 "Cooper's Farm," of some two hundred
acres, was in the market. The land, on the whole
poor, though some of it good for this district, had
been much neglected and was in a shocking condi-
tion. A little group of villagers, including the
schoolmaster and the village blacksmith, had been
accustomed to meet to discuss with Major Poore the
business of the County Council. They agreed to
attempt a small-holding experiment on this farm.
Theirs was the only offer at the auction sale, and

IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 61

the land was knocked down to them for £1,500 —
at the exceedingly low price of about £7 los. per
acre.

Major Poore gave the required security for the
purchase money. The various sections of the land
were valued — largely through the knowledge of old,
experienced men who knew what it was really worth.
A piece of some eighty acres, supposed to be too
heavy for small working, was sold in a lump for
£800. The remainder was divided into lots from half
an acre to twenty acres, and offered to those of the
village who decided to come into the scheme. These
lots were priced at different values — from £10 or
£12 to £30 an acre. The occupants agreed to pay
5 per cent, interest on the capital and to purchase
the land outright in capital and interest in twenty-
eight half-yearly payments extending over fourteen
years. They were united into a company forming
the " Landowners' Court " — with the land divided
into five sections, and each section electing a chair-
man and vice-chairman ; the whole, with the secretary
and the directors, forming a permanent committee.
It was calculated that as the payments were com-
pleted the funds at the disposal of the company
would steadily increase. At the end of the fourteen
years the Landowners' Court was to have some
£1,400 at its absolute disposal (representing the
difference between the purchase and selling prices),
and the landowners themselves would be the owners
of their own land.

Has the experiment succeeded ?

I had arrived almost at the end of it. Some seven
purchasers bought outright with their savings. The
remainder have been regularly making their half-
yearly payments. None of the original purchasers

62 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

defaulted. None gave up, except one who went
on a farm of his own. On November 4th of 1906
the last payments were made. The Landowners'
Court has to-day a balance of ^1,300. And the
forty-five members on that day were owning land
(on a lease of 2,000 years) with no encumbrances but
rate and tithe.

The "landowners" have not been content with
their land. They have built houses upon it, borrow-
ing money for the purpose from the Oddfellows and
other friendly societies, or in some cases from the
Landowners' Court. Over thirty houses, built since
the beginning of the experiment by those concerned
in it, stand to-day to testify to the stimulating effect
of its operations.

The cottages of the Landowners' Court members
stand on a sloping hillside in a great crescent, facing
the woods. The land runs up and down from them
in long strips, mostly of one or two acres in extent.
The men and boys were working on their plots as
I passed from one to another to learn their opinion
of success or failure. The whole, in the autumn
sunshine, with the long brown fields set in the forest
background, formed a pleasant picture of industry
and repose.

The cottages are of an astonishing variety. Some
are substantial buildings of red brick, some of mud
and chalk, faced with plaster. There are long, low
buildings of the bungalow type, one-storied, thatched,
with white walls. There are even one or two of
corrugated iron. In the hollow are the cottages of
a more rudimentary type, built by the original small-
holders who had annexed the common land more

IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 63

than a hundred years ago. Some of the landowners
had passed from these to their new abodes. The
contrast was marked. The average rooms in all the
village work out at some five and a half per cot-
tage, and the whole house accommodation offers a
marked advance on the normal type of cottage in
the normal landless village.

They were not indeed beautiful. Life has been
too hard till now to think much of ornament. But
there are little orchards growing up round them,
and flowers in the gardens ; and Mr. Witt, the
schoolmaster, is confident, now that the worst of
the strain is over, that the effort towards beauty
will steadily develop.

For the men take pride in their new houses.
They are rejoicing that the land is now their own,
It has been a tremendous struggle, especially for
those who launched out somewhat boldly into
elaborate building. But the worst is now over.
They can look forward with confidence to the
future. I met none, amongst all I talked with,
who regretted the effort made, who now would
have had it otherwise.

Criticism indeed is there in plenty. The men
are a fine set, of an independent, strong, intelli-
gent type. There are many Dissenters, mostly
teetotalers: the prevailing opinion is Radical,
though in the village blacksmith I discovered a
Socialist and eager follower of Mr. Keir Hardie.
They are sometimes annoyed by the efforts of
imaginative journalists, and one of the holders in-
formed me that "if they wrote any more lies in
the newspapers " about Winterslow he would " write
and contradict them."

The holdings are mostly small — of the nature of

64 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

allotments. One man claims to live entirely off a
piece of seven acres. Those with smaller quantities
are using their land to supplement the earnings
received outside. Some are pensioners, others
carters, one local secretary of the Rechabites.
There are three agricultural labourers, the postmen
and the postmaster, and several of the village trades-
men. But the work in the woods and at hurdle-
making is the chief industry; and more than a
third of the holders are engaged in them. It is
largely the opportunity of this winter work which
has made the Winterslow experiment a success.
There is no market gardening, and practically no
fruit. The land is used for the growing of potatoes
and cabbages, with some corn, and roots of all sorts,
grass, and clover. All keep pigs and poultry.

Cows are being kept in this astonishing village,
and yield good butter. And this, although the
land is on a hill 500 feet high, exposed to all
the storms of winter, where twenty years ago the
people had to journey five miles for a water supply.
To-day wells have been sunk and over fifty tanks
constructed in twelve years. But the long drought
to-day has been felt badly, and I was informed
that this was one of the worst seasons since the
work began.

For the rest, the produce goes mainly to the pigs
and to support the family needs. Some potatoes
are sold, although the marketing is difficult, with
Salisbury seven miles away on one side and
Bulford camp ten miles on the other. One man
claimed to me that his acre was worth to him
some £20 a year, besides another £6 or £8 from
pigs and poultry. Another emphasised the hard-
ness of the combined life on the land and in labour

IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 65

outside — work from before dawn till after sunset
with no rest — and protested that two or three acres
was not enough to support a man. He thought
that if the " Government " could lend them money
at a lower rate of interest than 4 or 5 per cent,
they would do better.

Opinion varied as to the amount of land required
for complete support : from ten or twelve acres on
the heavier land to twenty-five on the lighter.

Co-operation, I should think, was the advance
most urgently needed. All were loud in their
protest against the " Middleman " and his profits,
especially in the selling of the pigs and the pota-
toes. There has been a lecture on Co-operation,
but nothing more done. A holder of some thirty
acres — outside the Landowners' Court — was strong
in his demand for such Co-operation, and offered
to " place a little money in it " if it could be
started.

Mr. Witt was confident in the stimulating effect
of the experiment on the village. The price of
land has risen, and he regrets that the surplus of
the Landowners' Court was not used to purchase
more. A school field and recreation ground has
been purchased by the Parish Council for some
£225, or at about £5 an acre. In the old days it
could have been obtained at half the price. The
whole village population numbers more than 800,
of which about a quarter are members of the
Landowners' Court and their families.

Why has the experiment succeeded? In its
favour was the character of the people ; the sym-
pathy and help of Major Poore ; also the hearty

66 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

support of Mr. King, a neighbouring farmer ; and
the energy and capacity of Mr. Witt, the school-
master, who, from all I could learn, has been the
life and soul of the enterprise.

Two other items also were probably essential :
one the exceeding cheapness of the land ; the other
the existence of the woods in the neighbourhood,
with the work they regularly supplied. There is
also the presence of good roads everywhere adjacent
to the land purchased.

On the other hand, the land, though purchased
so cheaply, was sold at a greatly enhanced value —
twice or three times as much as the purchase price.
A normal experiment could forego the Landowners'
Court profit. Also interest has been paid at 5 per
cent, often on houses as well as on land. That is
a higher figure than would be necessary in any
public scheme.

The miracle, indeed, is that it has not collapsed in
failure. Everything else has been against it. The
land is poor, and had been long neglected. The
place is remote in its encompassing hills far from
any markets, high up on the windy plains, and
exposed to all the winter cold. It has no single
natural advantage for small holdings. The experi-
ment resembles Dr. Johnson's famous dancing dog —
the wonder is not that it danced badly, but that it
dances at all. It would seem that if small holdings
succeed at Winterslow they would succeed far
beyond the recognised boundaries of possible
success.

And the bedrock facts remain. No one can
question the severity of the struggle which these
men have gone through, nor the pluck and the
grit they have shown in its continuance. The Irish

IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS 67

peasant is buying his land in forty-nine annual
payments. These men have bought theirs in four-
teen. In the same time they have built houses,
large and comfortable, and have been paying in-
terest on the borrowed money. There has not been
a single defaulter, and the people who originally
started are there to-day.

And the results? Winterslow almost alone
amongst the neighbouring villages shows a definite
increase in population during the past fifteen years,
and this though it steadily decreased before that
time. The land has been inconceivably improved,
the labourers are better off, the population of the
village has been kept on the soil. I think in these
wind-swept uplands, in an existence so remote and
austere, there are elements of well-being lacking
in that life which crowds all the city ways. The
children as I saw them were well dressed, clean,
intelligent, healthy. The men were of a type far
different from the inhabitants of the feudal village.
They are free men. They eat of the fruit of their
own labour, not unsatisfied. And none can make
them afraid.

Night was falling as I drove out of Winterslow,
and my last sight of it was of the long escarpment
with the trees black against the skyline, under the
light of an enormous yellow moon. A little mist
was gathering in the valleys and over the hills,
filling the twilight with a great impression of
mystery and beauty. We came down into Salis-
bury as into a sea of vapour; from the centre of
which rose triumphant that tall Cathedral tower
which has watched the passing of six hundred
years.

PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL

" WHEN I have been living in the Midlands, which
are sodden and unkind " ; — so Mr. Belloc commences
his poem in praise of the South Country. I have
never found the Midlands unkind ; but " sodden "
they were, indeed, on this the first day of the autumn
rains. We drove from Birmingham under grey skies,
from which descended a kind of solid downpour,
veiling the distance in grey mist and turning the
roads into thick streams of mud. It was the first
break after the long drought, and every one, except
the hapless visitor, was rejoicing at the change. I
drove to Bell Broughton with Mr. Impey, that
veteran land reformer. He was full of the stori<
of '85, and showed me, framed and hung in his house,
the original pamphlet he had written upon " Thi
Acres and a Cow," which had started the great
agitation. After twenty years of quietness and
indifference he was once more full of hope for the
coming of reform. He emphasised the greatness of
the opportunity offered, as well as the peril of its
refusal. And the chief difference, in his opinion,
between then and to-day was to be found in the fact
that whereas in the older time small holdings were,
in a sense problematical, with analogies mainly

PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL 69

drawn from foreign experience, to-day there are a
series of definite experiments, on the tiniest scale,
but very fruitful in lessons of wider application,
which in the past twelve or fifteen years have
demonstrated their practical working.

And of these not the least instructive were
the developments which had taken place amongst
the nail-makers of Bell Broughton and round
Bromsgrove.

A few years ago Bell Broughton was a nailing vil-
lage. Each little cottage has still to-day the nail shed
attached to it, with the block and the chimney and
the forge. Men and women worked hard all day for
wages which averaged some 125. a week in the case
of the one, and 43. to 53. in the other. The industry
steadily declined under the competition of machinery.
The life became a hard, wretched slavery for a
diminishing pittance. The people were becoming
demoralised under the influences of poverty, and
were continually before the magistrates for poaching
and thieving ; a very large number were on the rates,
and doles of bread and soup were regularly given by
the Squire during the winter.

Under such circumstances the Rector, the Rev.
J. H. Eld, became, twelve years ago, chairman and
first clerk of the newly-formed Parish Council. He
immediately set himself to acquire land to let out
in small holdings. The first piece hired was a small
plot of 1 8 acres. This was so successful that the
Council have proceeded since to obtain every piece
of land they could get hold of. To-day they are
renting 1 80 acres, which is let to 75 holders, of
whom 27 have over an acre each. For the first piece

70 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

they were forced to pay a rent of over £3 an acre.
Later they took a farm which was practically de-
serted, let at 1 5s. an acre, of which the rent had not
been paid for two years. This land was let to them
at 22s. 6d. an acre. They spent £60 on drainage,
roads, and improvements, and have now re-let it in
small plots at 303. an acre. They always let at
a price so as to keep a margin for emergencies.
They have over .£250 in hand. They have lost no
money at all in defaults or bad debts. They are
eagerly looking round for fresh land to hire, and the
land hunger of the village is still unsatisfied.

Even in the driving autumn rain the charm of this
country is manifest ; with its roads set in deep
hedges and tall trees scattered amongst them, and
the gently sloping hills everywhere giving colour in
the near distance. The little houses, many old and
picturesque, are set in fruitful gardens, gay with all
the October flowers. The land is indeed a garden —
converted into such by the energy of those who
determined that the people should have access
to the land, and by the response of those people
when the opportunity was given them.

For of its success there can be no doubt at all.
The village has become transformed. The people
grow for the Birmingham market, twelve miles away,
strawberries, flowers, potatoes, all kind of vegetables.
They keep their own horses and carts, and do their own
marketing, going in with the produce and coming out
with manure for their own land or to sell to their
neighbours. They buy up on the ground as they
stand the fields of vegetables from the neighbouring
farmers, bunching and cleaning them and taking

PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL 71

them into Birmingham to resell in their carts.
Flowers, I learnt, are the most remunerative of all.
Then the strawberries. One man had had an offer
of £150 for his two acres of strawberries. This
was exceptional ; but £100 was not excessive. On
one farm there are now twenty-six horses working
where formerly there were two. The ambition of
all was to keep a horse, and every one then wanted a
piece of pasture land. The nail-sheds were converted
into stables ; the derelict larid was growing large crops
of fruit and vegetables ; prosperity had come from the
liberation of the land.

I had a most interesting talk with Mr. Gill, the
Chairman of the Parish Council, a designer who
works for a Birmingham firm, and devotes his leisure
to disinterested service for his neighbours. He was
full of enthusiasm for the work accomplished, and of
hope for the work still to be done. The great
demand was for land and more land both for those
who had received some already and wanted more,
and also to give a start for the landless men. A
striking example had been offered the night before
my arrival. One of the tenants had relinquished a
plot of 4j acres. The Council (to make this go
round as far as possible) had divided it into four plots
of half an acre each, one of an acre, one of I J acre ;
and had invited applicants. Thirty-six had applied,
of whom twenty had no land at all, and this although
only one end of the village recognised that they had
any chance of acceptance. There was £9 los. com-
pensation to be paid to the outgoing tenant, but Mr.
Gill thinks they would have paid almost any sum to
get on to the land.

72 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

But the increase is difficult. A squire of the old
school denounces the whole scheme, because it
" makes the people too independent " and " raises
the price of labour." The Parish Council has no
compulsory powers of hiring or purchase. The
greater part of the land is taken on a twelve
months' agreement only, and although one of the
principal landlords — a clergyman — has promised not
to disturb the Council till his death, there is nothing
to prevent them being turned out in a year in other
parts, or the rents raised against them. Farmers
farm badly is Mr. Gill's complaint ; the land is
impoverished, and they then demand and obtain a
reduction of rent. We farm well, and as the very
result of our own improvements the rent may be
raised against us. He pleads for security, for the
right to be given to the Parish Council to buy the
land within its own boundaries, and keep it as Parish
Council land; for compulsory powers of having small
holdings as well as allotments. Allotments of less
than half an acre he thinks of little use ; and there is
an object-lesson in their failure in a neighbouring
village. The men cannot live on them, and are com-
pelled to work as labourers in Birmingham ; the
allotments are left to the wives and children, and
but little care is given to them. If they had more
land the men would give up their labourers' work
and devote themselves to the land itself, with results
similar to those at Bell Broughton.

For there is nothing here exceptional in the land
itself ; much of it is poor, and most of it only made
productive of such excellent crops by careful manur-
ing and indefatigable labour. Birmingham — a steady
market only twelve miles away — is one of the factors
of success. But at Birmingham much of the produce

PARSON AND PARISH COUNCIL 73

is purchased for Lancashire and the northern towns.
Undoubtedly, however, the possibility of return loads
of cheap manure has helped considerably. There is
no co-operation, and I expect under the circum-
stances it would be difficult and (in selling, at least)
perhaps not very profitable. But there are schemes
for combining to purchase at wholesale prices.

I learnt of some special 'cases of those who had
worked their way up the ladder — from the first tiny
patch of land to a complete economic independence.
One was of a labourer who used to walk eight miles
a day to his work for 6Jd. an hour. He now farmed
two acres of land, owned his horses and a young
heifer, with a substantial sum in cash put away.
Another, once with a great reputation as " King of
the Poachers," had transferred his energies to the
market garden and had passed on to the larger
County Council holdings at Catskill.

Twenty-seven of the seventy-five tenants are princi-
pally dependent on their holdings for a living ; all are
in want of more land. The others are continually
pressing the Parish Council for land to raise their
small plots into economic holdings. An enterprising
farmer has taken advantage of the demand and
sublet land rented at 255. an acre for £3 to the small
holders.

We entered one cottage quite casually as two
strangers caught in the rain. Everything was clean
and tidy, a bright fire burning, an aspect of modest
comfort. The wife welcomed us. The husband was
away with the cart at Birmingham, taking in his
carrots and parsnips. The story was soon told.

74 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

There was the nailing in the old days — work from
nine till seven for the women for 43. or 5s. a week ;
work from seven to seven for the men for los. to I2s.
Sometimes work all night. Then half an acre offered
on the allotments, and then a further opportunity of
improvement as more land became accessible. Now
they work three acres of land. The children help.
They own a horse and cart, the horse stabled in the
old nailing shed, which we were taken to see. Their
great desire is more land : with two acres more they
would be satisfield.

The land was on the hill above ; long lines of
strawberries, broccoli, cabbages, carrots, a little oats,
all carefully cultivated on the land which a few years
ago had been practically derelict.

" Last year," said Mr. Impey as we left, " I heard a
noble lord deprecating legislation as a remedy for the
ills of mankind in the well-known quotation : —

" How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure."

" I wish I could have shown him Bell Broughton
as I knew it yesterday and Bell Broughton as I see
it to-day."

Ill

A FIGHT FOR' FREEDOM

IT lies remote from the cities along the borders of
the Malvern Hills ; a large straggling parish centred
in the great common. I came to it in a long drive
from Malvern, a piece of Wimbledon planted out in
the West Country ; along roads whose hedges were
thick with blackberries, and past golfers pursuing
their desperate business in the rain. There must be
few more radiant visions in England to-day than the
view as I saw it from Castle Morton Common. It is
a riotous feast of colour ; behind, the purple hills ; all
round, the yellows and reds and browns of the gorse
and blazing bracken ; beyond blue vistas on a far
horizon. The open land as it falls downwards is
studded with the little clumps of trees which, in
patches of orchard and a red roof peeping through
them, mark the freeholds reclaimed from the common
land. Twelve counties stretch below, with great
cities whose lights at nightfall can be. seen shining
far over the wide plain ; on a quiet evening you can
hear the sound of many bells.

Here for many generations have lived a vigorous,
independent people. They have been kept from
servitude by the absence of resident landlords, by
the presence of the freeholders with their own little

76 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

plots of land, and by the unenclosed common, which
has given them opportunity for the exercise of
common rights. There has always been a demand
for land in the district. The Parish Councils Act
of 1894 gave them the opening they desired. Castle
Morton stands to-day at the head of those sixteen
Parish Councils who have put into operation the
clauses dealing with small holdings, as one of the
very few villages where the Parish Council has been
of substantial benefit to the people.

Mr. Weaver, the Chairman, a sturdy Radical
yeoman of the old school, told me the history of it
all. At the beginning, while the Act was in the
making, they had seen its opportunities. Imme-
diately on its passing they had Determined to make
effective use of it. They set themselves to canvass
the whole village ; they had tramped from house to
house through the muddy lanes, on the wet nights,
interviewing each individual voter ; they had per-
suaded them to resist the blandishments of the
farmers, who had pleasantly arranged amongst
themselves the membership of the Council ; and they
had elected and maintained — alone amongst neigh-
bouring villages — an independent and democratic
Parish Council. In the twelve years of its existence
it had secured about 220 acres of land for the people
of the village.

This had not been accomplished without the
fiercest opposition. The farmers were everywhere
bitterly opposed to the small holdings and the inde-
pendence which accompanied them. The land agents,
if not so actively hostile, were not inclined to en-
courage them. All round the landlords were con-

A FIGHT FOR FEEEDOM 77

vinced that small holdings meant the ruin of sport
and the spread of Radical sentiments. It is not
without a modest pride that Castle Morton to-day
contemplates its achievement in spite of so many
adverse influences.

The land is rented from Lady Henry Somerset and
the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. These latter have
been sympathetic all through to the movement
towards independence, and deserve every credit for
breaking through the traditional opposition to the
creation of the small holder. It is gathered in
three plots in different parts of the scattered parish.
The largest of these was offered as the poorest part
of a farm, taken on a twenty-one years' lease at a
rental of I2s. an acre. It has been re-let in plots
varying from I2s. to 233. an acre — free of rate. It is
much of it very poor, stony land, and was taken over
in a very foul condition. Some has been put down
to pasture by the men themselves. Some is divided
into one, and two acre lots and used for growing a
variety of crops. There is but little market-garden-
ing, and no fruit on the Council land, though a good
deal on the freeholds outside. Wheat is grown for
home consumption (none of it sold), beans for the
pigs, vetches, roots, potatoes. The rent is paid
regularly. There is a fine of is. for a failure to pay
on audit day ; but there have been no defaults, and
the cheques are paid by the Council, I was proudly
informed, more punctually than those of the farmers.

As we tramped over the long fields, with the
boundary posts alone marking the successive
tenancies, Mr. Weaver gave me a short life history
of each of its occupants. Living was obtained in a
variety of ways. The common, of course, was a
great stand-by. Most of the villagers had cows out

78 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

upon it, and would cut the gorse and bracken for
bedding and subsequent manure. The hill above
was fruitful with blackberries, and yielded a welcome
crop which was freely gathered and sent to distant
markets. Every one kept pigs and poultry, and the
wives would sell eggs and butter and fowls for the
Malvern visitors seven miles away. The freeholds
were largely planted with little orchards, full of
apples and plums, and cider was made by all. Some
buy Welsh colts in Hereford Fair for turning out on
the common. One tenant works at the stone quarry,
turns out young cattle on the common, and adds the
allotment ground to two acres of his own. Many do
a little work for the farmers at harvesting time.
One supplements work on his holding with sheep-
shearing, pig-killing, and faggoting. All work hard
for a livelihood, and all want more land.

The difficulty of getting enough land was the
burden I heard everywhere. We have enough allot-
ments, the clerk of the Parish Council informed
me. We want small holdings. Whenever a piece
is available there is a rush of applicants; "pretty
near a free fight for it," as Mrs. Weaver described it.
On the last occasion they had to have recourse to
the ballot to decide amongst competing claims.
The men " would rather give up a hand than lose an
acre," was Mr. Weaver's vivid phrase. But the land
cannot be obtained for love or money. Most of the
parish is held by a few large farmers, six men holding
1,400 acres. On the last occasion when the agent
suggested a few acres should be let to the Parish
Council the farmer informed him that " if he took an
acre he should have the lot, for he would throw up

A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM 79

the farm." They get the worst land : odds and ends
here and there : but " we don't complain." They
pay a higher rent than for the land let in large farms.
They farm better ; land which was yielding farmers
fifteen bushels an acre was now giving thirty. They
are rated higher, and complain that the small plots
pay 7s. or 8s. an acre while the large farms pay 2s.
to 43. The land hunger is taxed by the competition
which forces up rents to an abnormal figure. Yet all
the economic advantage is unable to break down the
steady, persistent prejudice of country opinion against
the transference of land directly into the hands of
the labourer.

They call for compulsory powers of hiring to be
given to the Parish Councils. They are willing to
give a fair rent for the land and make no demand
for confiscation. They believe that in many cases,
with the possibilities of compulsion behind, they
could persuade the agent to break down the farmers'
opposition. Only access to the land, is the experience,
can keep the people in the country. If land and
cottages were obtainable " plenty would be glad to
come back here " who had gone away to the cities
for lack of either. They acknowledge their condition,
which holds a square mile of free common, to be an
exceptional one ; but all round there are " thousands
who want it." " Not a labourer but would like an
acre or two." A man could live without the common
rights if he had twenty to twenty-five acres. If such
small farms were available in the neighbourhood
many would move on to them opening the smaller
holdings to the landless men. The Government
should buy land, or hire it, and put up cottages and
buildings upon it. They could let these again easily
at a profit. Here in the country the Liberal Party

80 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

is still the Labour Party. Now that a Liberal
Government is again in power they had the strongest
hopes of " Land Reform."

At least here the Parish Council land scheme has
helped to stay the rural exodus. Up to 1891 the
population had decreased from 950 to 720. By 1901
it has risen again to 795. The people are intelligent,
industrious, independent. The poaching and chicken
stealing, for which its inhabitants had attained a
reputation all over Worcestershire, is said to have
disappeared with the prosperity which the land has
brought. They seek no eleemosynary aid, and
warmly repudiate the dole system of a beneficent
Feudalism. They advocate no predatory policy.
They are confident that they can make the land pay
if only they are given a chance. They merely ask to
be allowed to work out their own salvation in these
remote and quiet hills, with the opening of the oppor-
tunity for frugal comfort which only direct access to
the land can give.

We sat in front of the large open fireplace under
the low roof in Mr. Weaver's picturesque house,
decorated with portraits of Gladstone and John
Bright. The rain splashed steadily outside; Mrs.
Weaver pressed upon us generous hospitality, while
the old fighter in the cause of reform told of the
passing days through which they had struggled into
freedom. It was a peep into the heart of rural
England ; told in language very picturesque and
simple. They were fortunate in not being " accurst "
with a resident landlord. The parson, " a Tory, of
course," had been " pliable," and helped them by
backing the wish of the majority ; he was now dead

A FIGHT FOR FREEDOM 81

and they were a little anxious about the new man,
an Archdeacon, and, therefore, probably "less pliable."
He told how the agent had attempted to forbid the
people the blackberrying, which provided " clothes
and shoes for the children in the winter " ; of the
petition to Lady Henry Somerset, and the letter to
Mr. Labouchere asking that Truth would "obtain
publication of the rascal's villainy"; of the consequent
withdrawal of the prohibition. He told how the
Parish Councils round had collapsed, being captured
by the landlord and farmers ; of how the Parish
Council land in one had been snatched up by a
farmer for his own son ; of how the farmer had
died shortly afterwards from cancer in the throat :
"which may have been a judgment on him," said
Mr. Weaver. He told stories of the Homeric contest
at the General Election ; of how his sons had con-
fronted the Tory speakers with posers concerning
Chinese Labour and Unemployment; of how when the
speakers were compelled to fall back on the virtues
of the Tory member, who gave blankets and coals
every winter, the audience had stoutly retorted :
" We don't want that here." He outlined the hopes
for the future which had accompanied the great
change ; how his son wished to migrate to New
Zealand, but he was persuading him to stay, as he
was sure that the Liberals would give an opportunity
to get land here at home ; how the people cared
nothing for the Education Bill, and little about
foreign affairs ; what they wanted was Land Reform.
"Tell Sir Henry," said Mr. Weaver, with delibera-
tion, " if the House of Lords reject the Education
Bill — don't reesign. And if they reject Mr. Asquith's
Progressive Taxation — don't reesign. And if they
reject Land Reform — don't reesign. But get enough

82 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

from Progressive Taxation for old-age pensions.
And go to the people with old-age pensions for the
towns and land reform for the country ; and," he
added impressively, "we'll putt ye in for twenty
yeers."

The long line of the downs casts its shadow over
our way homeward ; standing up solitary out of the
great plain like the huge grave of one of the older
gods. I thought of one who in the old days had
escaped from the city to consider " all the welth of
the world and the wo both," upon the Malvern Hills.
He had seen the rich successful and content, the poor
perishing, with no man laying it to heart. He had
written in his vision of " Piers the Plowman " out of
his own heart's bitterness something of his passionate
impatience with it all. He had deemed that the
patience of God must be well-nigh exhausted — five
hundred years ago.

NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS

THE Small Holdings Act was passed in 1892. It
represented a kind of belated attempt to carry out
the " unauthorised programme " of seven years
before. The County Councils were here given
powers of settling people on the land. A County
Council of intelligence and energy in a district
favourable to small holdings might have effected
a small agrarian revolution.

As a matter of fact the Act stands to-day as
almost a complete failure. Experiments in its
working have only been made by one or two
Councils, and these only on the tiniest scale. The
largest, and, in many respects, the most interest-
ing, is the attempt made by the Worcestershire
County Council to convert the nailmakers of Catshill
into market gardeners.

Immediately on the passing of the Act this
Council appointed its Small Holdings Committee,
and circulated handbills and notices. Two years
later they reported that as a result of over two
thousand public notices issued one application had
been received ! It would have appeared to most
that the demand was dead ; that the Council had
done all that was reasonable ; that nothing more
remained to do.

84 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

There were land reformers on the Council how-
ever, who refused to be content with such a confession
of failure. It was agreed to make a start amongst
the nailmakers of Catshill, and as a result of a
petition sent in, and a public inquiry, a farm of
nearly 150 acres was purchased at an average price
of £33 an acre (including the timber). The land
was divided up into thirty-two lots and offered to
applicants. By the provisions of the Act one-fifth of
the purchase money must be paid by the incoming
tenant. In 1896 ten tenants were found ready to
pay this 20 per cent, and thus become purchasers
of their land. The remainder were allowed to have
the plots while completing their share of the pur-
chase money by instalments.

To-day there are twenty-five tenants, five buying
more than one lot each. They are purchasing the
land in forty years from the first payment. The
value works out at from £32 to £50 per acre, which
means an annual payment of something between 303.
and £2 per acre. The interest of this experiment is
very greatly increased by the housing scheme which
accompanies it. From the beginning it was seen
here — as in all small holding schemes — that the pro-
vision of fresh houses would be a necessity. It was
therefore arranged that the County Council should
here also come to the aid of the tenant. The
small holder presents to the Council the plans of
his house and stables, with the estimate of the
cost. He provides one-quarter of the price, and
the Council advances him the remaining three-
quarters. Payments are arranged so as to terminate
at the same time as the land purchased. They work
out at something like 4 per cent, of the capital
advanced. At the end of the time the tenant will

NAILMAKEKS AND FARMERS 85

come into absolute possession of house and land
simultaneously, free from all mortgages and obliga-
tions.

Catshill lies in undulating country twelve miles
out of Birmingham. The district where the small
holders are established is a little bare and common-
place, with none of the fascination of some other
districts visited. Standing on the highest ground,
where one of the most successful of the small
holdings is established, the whole thing stretches
out below like a map. Nine houses have been built
under the County Council scheme. They are all
on view ; all of red brick, standing up straight out
of the fields of vegetables ; substantial villas, with
bow windows and porches, and stables and out-
houses behind. They look like nothing so much
as a comfortable suburban street which has been
broken up and scattered at random over the fields.
Inside they are roomy and pleasant: the smallest
with three rooms below and three bedrooms above.
They cannot be called things of beauty, although
time and the gardens and little trees planted around
them may make them less truculent in fifty or a
hundred years. But they are an inconceivable
advance on the " picturesque " country cottage, with
its low ceilings and faulty sanitation. The people
take immense pride in them, and the expenditure on
each — from £250 to ^"500 — was deliberate. I found
a wide consensus of opinion that they were too
ambitious, and that the owners would have done
better to invest more of their capital in stock and in
the land than to sink it in house property. But, after
all, it is welcome to find this determination towards
the raising of the standard of a home. The low

86 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

rate of interest makes things here easy which would
be impossible without it, and men are buying these
comfortable villas for a rent of some 55. or 6s.
a week.

The staple industry is market-gardening for the
Birmingham market. Strawberries are the only
fruit grown, but these in the past have been im-
mensely profitable. This year has been the worst
since the beginning. I heard complaints that the
plants were getting useless, the ground being worked
out, and that the market was becoming overcrowded.
These complaints probably mean not much more
than that the dry season has greatly diminished
the profits. In addition, potatoes are grown, and
cabbages and other kinds of common vegetables.
The soil is light and stony — not more than fair
second-class land. There is little attempt at inten-
sive cultivation, or the raising of any special crops.
There is very little poultry kept — the ground is
"too valuable," and pig-keeping is only on a very
limited scale. All keep horses, and take their
produce to sell at the Birmingham market, and bring
back the manure which is such a vital factor in
the success of the enterprise. From eight to twelve
acres is said to be necessary for an entire livelihood
— which very few possess. The others supplement
their earnings by horse-work for the villagers or
neighbouring farmers and by miscellaneous activities.

I found Catshill on this fine day after the rains
a scene of busy industry. Some of the holders
were building a rick together; others were digging
up their potatoes, or planting cabbages in the fresh
wet soil. One of the most successful had here made

NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS 87

land pay, which had been refused by all others on
account of its evil appearance. He had been a
nailer in the old days with some success, making
special kinds which demanded special skill. I
gathered also from some occult allusions to rabbit
snaring (which he enjoyed greatly) by Mr. Impey
that the nailing had been eked out with other less
reputable occupations. Now he was farming his
thirteen acres, and had built a substantial house.
He complained that this season had been a bad
one ; " very crooel " for the strawberries. He agreed
that the Council scheme had brought great benefit
to the district. There was the land there in the
old days, but it was impossible to get hold of it.
" They'n seemed a bit speerin' on't." It was hard
work, he allowed ; but those who worked hard can
get on and make a decent livelihood. The wife,
who was with him, and who helped in the work,
agreed that these times were better than the old days.
In another field I found a landless man working
for his neighbourers : lifting potatoes by contract,
and assisted in the work by his wife and three small
children. He could make at this some 43. a day.
He acknowledged to Mr. Impey that this was better
than the old 2s. a day wages ; but described in
graphic fashion the difference of method under the
two systems. Then, with his coat on, sundry pauses
for surveying the scenery or to take a whiff of his
pipe, a general determination not to kill himself with
overwork. Now, he thought "there was something
wrong " if he knocked off for a moment before the
work was done. He was a builder's labourer, now
out of work. His great longing was to start with
a plot of land of his own. He would be prepared to
make a start on half an acre. He thought he could

88 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

get a living off three acres. But no land could be
obtained. If any came into the market it was
snatched up immediately by those more fortunate.
If some of the bigger farms could be broken up to
give those like himself a chance it would be "a lot
pleasanter for a lot of us."

On another holding a man was surveying his newly-
bought pig gobbling up a liberal meal of potatoes.
He was engaged in some obscure struggle with the
Council concerning repairs, and appeared a little
dissatisfied with life. He thought the strawberries
were ceasing to pay, and that the reason pig-keeping
was not more prevalent was the lack of capital. He
professed his readiness to relinquish his holding if
he could obtain the money expended on it. Mr.
Impey assured him that the Council would accept
a tenant who wished to come in, and that if he
advertised the thing for sale at the price he would
receive twenty or thirty applicants. A neighbour
praised this as a fair offer, and both acknowledged
that there would be no difficulty in finding a
purchaser on such lines.

In the neighbourhood of Catshill I came by chance
upon Tom Bryan, once Mayor of Southwark and
Labour leader, now established in the Midlands as
a practical agriculturist. It was interesting to hear
an outside criticism of the Council experiment. He
complained as others have complained elsewhere of
the effort of the imaginative journalist who drives
furiously through the village and subsequently lets
himself go upon it.

He thinks all the men need more land, the quantity
they possess only yielding a good living if cultivated

NAILMAKEKS AND FARMERS 89

far more intensively and skilfully than at present.
But the land around has been forced up in rent by
the demand for small holdings from 153. to 553. or
6os. an acre. He thinks also the holders lack enter-
prise. They have too many of their eggs in one
basket — the strawberries and the market-gardening ;
they ought to combine this with pig-keeping and
bees and other subsidiary developments. He is con-
vinced that the Parish Council, as a machinery for
establishing small holdings, is better than the County
Council : less paternal, more democratic ; the people
establishing the work amongst themselves, discussing
matters together, learning independence and citizen-
ship, instead of being governed by the Committee of
another class, far away. He deplores the weakness
of the social ideal which here, as elsewhere, has made
co-operation impossible. He has seen a succession
of carts passing into Birmingham, each half empty,
each taking its owner for a 24-mile ride and a day's
work. Why should they not combine and run a
motor in and out ? But the men are mostly Radicals
and Primitive Methodists ; and " Radicals and Primi-
tive Methodists," said Mr. Bryan, "do not readily
take to combination."

Mr. Impey was inclined to the opposite view.
He agreed that more land was desirable, but admired
the thrift and independence of the men, and thought
that in the special circumstances of the case each
man did better with his own market for his produce
and his own seller of manure than he would do
in a general combination. At least, he could
testify from his lifelong knowledge of many of the
holders the immense improvement in human well-
being that had come to them out of the land. With
the decline in the nailing industry— at best, a hard,

90 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

austere life — starvation was literally confronting them.
The industry to-day was nearly dead, and those
who had not succeeded in getting on to the land
have wandered into the cities or fled across the sea.
Here a prosperous community had been established
by the deliberate action of a County Council which
had refused to be discouraged at the failure of its
first efforts.

He admitted that the men would probably have
been content to hire from the Council upon terms
which eventually would have left the land in its
absolute ownership. But he did not think County
Councils, in the present condition of public opinion,
could be induced to buy land. He thinks the 20
per cent, purchase money too great a strain on the
average holding, and would like to see these condi-
tions relaxed. Worcestershire was in some respects
the Mecca of small holders owing to the enormous
development of market gardening and fruit growing
in the Evesham district. Yet in Worcester, with its
480,000 acres, there was probably not 30,000 acres in
the hands of the small holders. Some of the land
was unsuitable, but the bulk of it could easily be
adapted to direct cultivation. The possibilities in
South England were limitless, if prejudice could be
overcome and the right stimulus applied. But land-
lords, on account of sport, and farmers, for fear of
diminishing labour and raising its cost, were almost
universally against it.

To put the people on the land is not an ending,
but a beginning. It is a long effort — not accom-
plished in a generation — before they have learnt the
most skilful methods of cultivation and the necessity

NAILMAKERS AND FARMERS 91

for combination. But it is at least a beginning ;
while over the greater part of rural England the
present system of agriculture is near its end. Com-
paring the free village as I have seen it to-day with
the feudal village as I have long known it in the
past, I would fully endorse the verdict of the Land-
less Labourer. It would be " a lot pleasanter for a
lot of us" if the one could be transferred into the
other.

"THE LAND OF GOSHEN"

SPALDING lies in the centre of that rich plain which
extends within the boundaries of three Cathedral
cities — from Ely in the south to Peterborough on the
west, and nearly to Lincoln on the north. It is a
land of Goshen : rich, fat land, the finest soil in
England. Here nearly a hundred years ago Cobbett
had noted the contrast between the prosperity of the
pigs and the poverty of the peasants. Here to-day
the farmers can defy the effect of the fall in prices
and the so-called agricultural depressions. It is a
region where a little land can give good returns ;
where in consequence the demand for allotments and
small holdings is almost unlimited. There are pro-
bably 2,000 small holders in the villages of South
Lincolnshire alone, and over 20,000 holdings in the
county under 50 acres.

And here, three miles from Spalding, is the scene
of the famous experiment on Lord Carrington's
estate, in the subdivision of large farms to satisfy
this land hunger.

It arose from small beginnings ; nearly twenty
years ago by the formation of allotment clubs

amongst the labourers with a weekly subscription.

Then on the passing of the Small Holdings Act a

"THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 93

progressive County Council were persuaded to pur-
chase from Lord Carrington a farm of 88 acres and
to let it out in I to 3 acre plots. Later Mr. Winfrey
formed an association, to which Lord Carrington let
increasing quantities of land. They commenced
with 217 acres; then added 60, then 265; and
taking over also 116 acres of scattered allotment
fields, to-day the Association are controlling 650
acres, or more than a square mile of land, at a rent
of £1,018.

The Association is directly responsible for the rent
to Lord Carrington and for the rates to the local
authorities. It divides up the land into suitable
patches, arable and grass land ; relets it to its
tenants ; manages the property and collects the
rent. It holds the land on a 21 years' lease. It lets
the grass lands at from 363. to 45$. an acre, and the
arable at about 355. It has over 200 tenants, and
can receive 40 or 50 applicants for any piece of land
which it finds vacant.

The day I spent with Mr. Diggle, who manages
the estate for the Association, was one of the most
interesting in my tour round England. In the
morning I was permitted to witness the signing of
the agreements of the eight largest tenants, six of
whom have moved into the cottages Lord Carrington
has just built for them. The frank discussion of
difficulties and demands was an object-lesson in the
tact and patience required in the work of promoting
small holdings and of the method by which, through
such tact and patience, the difficulties can be over-
come. But small holders, like the rest of the human
species, are not entirely free from jealousy of each

94 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

other and distrust of any combination of business
and philanthropy.

We drove out from Spalding into the level land.
The cottages on the outskirts were nearly all held by
men who worked on the Association land, and who
had to. journey three, four, or five miles to get to
their holdings. The length of this journey was
undoubtedly a severe handicap, and the fact that
the men were willing to undertake it shows the force
of the land hunger. We passed a public-house,
where I was told the takings had greatly diminished
since the men had obtained access to the land.
Then we shook off the straggling village and passed
out to the wide fields. This low land, with the great
dykes draining it and the long black fields stretching
away to the limitless horizon, is only vacant when
the ripe corn turns it for a moment into a sea of
gold. To-day, with the autumn sunshine over it
and all the signs of the dying year, there is but the
mournful beauty of wide spaces under clear skies.
Little church spires in the distance alone mark the
presence of the little quiet towns : Crowland Abbey,
in the brooding silence of its great memories, showed
far in the dim distance. The smell of the earth and
the smell of autumn mingle in the sharp union of
permanence and decay ; the blue smoke lifts upward
steady in the windless air ; the whole gives a great
impression of spaciousness and silence. The enor-
mous arch of sky stretches over a land whose
tranquillity may be disturbed, but cannot be de-
stroyed.

The land of the Association lies in a long, narrow
patch, extending from the Spalding road on the one
side to the river Welland on the other — a distance of

"THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 95

over three miles. At the roadside are the six new
cottages which have been built by Lord Carrington
for the largest of the small holders. They are pretty,
comfortable buildings, which I inspected inside and
out, each with a parlour, a large kitchen and pantry,
and a dairy below, and four good bedrooms above.
They have cost some £500 a pair, and are let for
£10 a year. This is not an economic return ; but
the addition is made by the increased cost on some
of the poorer land which i's let with the holdings.
Behind are the necessary farm buildings which have
been put up by the Association, of dark-stained wood
with corrugated iron roofing, looking very clean and
pleasant, erected at the cost of about £90 each.
With the house and building is let about 25 acres,
and there would appear to be no difficulty in making
the house and land together, let as an "economic
holding," pay a fair rent on the capital expended.

Thence I passed to inspection on the holdings and
talks with the men who were working on them. The
farming is of the orthodox type, growing corn, and
especially potatoes, and raising stock ; there are few
attempts at fruit or flowers, or any special develop-
ment of high-priced vegetables or market gardening.
The size of the holdings varied from a few roods of
land to the largest holding of some forty acres.
Most of the tenants had started as labourers ; of the
eight most successful seven had commenced as boys
on the land, earning 6d. a day at scaring birds and
other boys' occupations. Estimates at the amount
required for a complete living varied, some thinking
they couid support themselves on as little as ten
acres, others demanding twenty-five or thirty. They
lamented the waste of time in travelling four or five
miles to get on to their holding and the absence of

96 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

nearer cottage accommodation. One tenant, renting
five acres from the Association and four from the
County Council, was making a complete living out
of his nine acres, growing beans, potatoes, and corn
crops, and keeping pigs and young stock. Another
had been on a farm for twenty-one years as a day-
labourer at 1 6s. a week until given this opportunity.
He now occupied seventeen acres. His cottage had
been adapted to his needs by the building of a dairy,
and he possessed accommodation in the buildings of
the large farm, which had been most ingeniously
divided so as to provide for seven small holders. His
chief regret seemed to be that Lord Carrington had
not visited his house on his recent visit. His bees had
died in the winter, but a wandering swarm had come
to him this summer, which looked like a Providential
compensation. He showed us with pride his young
pigs in the pigstyes he had built, and his horse, for
which he would not take .£30. He declared that
Lord Carrington was the first who had made land
there accessible to the poor man. Land, he admitted,
was offered in plots before, but always in small
pieces at double the price of the larger farms. Lord
Carrington was letting at the same price to the little
man as the big man, for which the poor man could
not be sufficiently grateful.

Later a large farmer — and very efficient one — in
the neighbourhood was kind enough to give us a lift,
and on the way to our destination expressed the case
against small holdings. He thought the demand for
these entirely due to the giving of the franchise to
the labourer. He asserted that the large farmer
employed as much labour on his land as the small

-THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 97

farmer, and got more out of it, so that the cutting up
of large farms into small farms would not support
one additional person on the soil. If agriculture
paid better they would employ more labour; as it
was, they had to cut it as low as possible. That was
why the men dismissed went into the cities. Make
it profitable and they would come out again quick
enough. This could only be done by raising prices
and protecting the English farmer against foreign
competition. " It's bound to 'come," he asserted with
cheerful confidence. He attributed the depopulation
of Ireland to the fall in the price of wheat, and
expressed the utmost conterr ot for Denmark, where
they kept only a few "old black and white cows."
He could find a more profitable occupation than
making butter or cheese. If they wanted Dutch
cheeses they could go to Holland for them, and if
cheap butter, to Denmark, with its "old black and
white cows." Where small holdings paid it could
only be done by starving and crippling the children,
of which he mentioned some examples. Some one
must own the land, and the present landlords are as
good as any other, and were fair and generous to
their tenants. For the rest, wheat at 6os. a quarter,
as in the old days, would be the best machinery for
repopulating the country districts of England.

In contrast to this deliberate opinion I visited a
small holder who had fought his way upwards on
Parish Council allotments. He had commenced as
a labourer at 2s. a day — sometimes taking home
73. or 8s. a week, or less than a farthing for each
meal of his children. Then he had obtained half an
acre of allotment land, and for three years had sold
nothing on it, growing wheat and potatoes as food
for the growing family. Then he had added another

98 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

half-acre and commenced a bit of building, and so
advanced by little and little to his present position
of comparative comfort. He now farmed four acres,
and would be content with two more. He had
erected a picturesque huddle of buildings entirely
with his own hand. He had brought up here a
family of nine, and taught himself to read and write.
He did a little of everything — jobbing work with his
pony and trap, pea picking in his kitchen in the
winter with all the family assisting and one reading
aloud to them. " I could tell you of hundreds of
things," was his comment. He was a teetotaler and
never owed a man a penny ; had fought his waj
upwards in a tremendous struggle ; would leave
better chance for his children than ever he had
ceived as a child.

Mr. Diggle showed me later the classified lists of
applicants for land. They amounted already to moi
than 2,000 acres, from persons of varied occupatioi
most of whom had saved a little money — £100,
£150 — which they were prepared to put into th<
land. There could be no doubt of the large possi-
bilities of development before small holdings in thi<
particular district. But here large farming pays,
that there is not much land in the market at any-
thing like reasonable rents. And capital is requin
for the adaptation of the large farm for the smalh
men and the provision of cottages and building'
Yet the Association have shown the way. T)
hundred people have been given access to the lan<
without having cost any one a halfpenny. They ai
cultivating it profitably, and the rents are regularb
paid. And there is the commencement at least ol

"THE LAND OF GOSHEN" 99

the ladder through which the landless man may pass
from the cultivation of half an acre in his free time
to complete economic independence. While there is
hope there is life ; and such hope, widely stimulated,
would do more than any " brightening of the villages "
to bring back life into rural England. It is good to
find our present Minister of Agriculture associated
directly with such an endeavour, and expressing his
ideal in such words as those of his last visit to
Spalding : " I hope that this great experiment, which
has given so much comfort and happiness to so many
families, may go on increasing, so that in days to
come, as its pioneer, Mr. Winfrey, has said, you may
have not only 2,000, but 20,000 acres in South
Lincolnshire under small holdings for the benefit of
yourselves and the community at large."

VI
THE OLD AND THE NEW

IN a corner of Norfolk, a tiny oasis in the flat fen
land, tucked away some immense distance from
the world that changes, stood a typical fen hamlet.
The cottages were in active decay, the population
diminishing, the whole bearing an aspect of fatigue
and of extreme old age. Here in one fortunate
exception, experiment has been made in the revival
of energy which accompanies the liberation of the
land for the people. First came the allotments of
one acre or less. Mr. Winfrey, member of Parlia-
ment for the division, found on visiting Nordelph,
the still surviving craving of the labourers for the
land. He purchased a small plot of fifty acres, and
arranged to let it out for a 5 per cent, return.
Offered at such a rent at a meeting in the village
chapel, the whole population were clamorous for it,
and after recourse to the ballot, the majority had to
be sent empty away. He persuaded them, however,
to attempt the putting in motion of the Small
Holdings Act ; to petition a County Council they had
never seen concerning an Act of which they had
never heard. The Norfolk County Council, more
progressive than most, were stirred into timid action.
At length a farm was bought at Nordelph of some

100

THE OLD AND THE NEW 101

one hundred and ten acres. By some singular folly
the twelve acres of grass land was let off to a
farmer already farming many hundred acres, and
the farm-house to a resident widow. Both would
have been invaluable to the small holders, and both
have only been returned to them, after some agita-
tion, this Michaelmas. The remainder of the land
is let out in small plots at such a rent as in fifty
years will repay principal anjd interest. At the end
of that time the small holders of Nordelph will
have purchased the land from private landlords and
returned it to the community.

I motored with Mr. Winfrey from King's Lynn
through the poorer and more beautiful land of the
higher region of Norfolk ; until the scenery changed
into the familiar landscape of the fens, with the
black earth and the great dykes running through
it ; and the evidence in the crowded and frequent
stackyards and the huge mangolds and potatoes of
the earth's fertility. Land here will sell for £40 an
acre, and farming is still exceedingly profitable.
But for the fact that labour will not stay, and the
villages are dwindling and the cottages falling to
pieces, farming might continue here on the old
system for many generations. But the presence
of the cities, with the escape thus offered from a
hard life of servitude with the workhouse at the end,
is assuring- the coming of an end.

I visited first a small farmer of some thirty-six
acres, in part on Mr. Winfrey's land, who told, in
language vigorous and picturesque, the story of his
fight towards independence. He had been born
" near the Union." He had come (in his own

102 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

expression) "out of the earth." He had worked
as a labourer ; then combined day work with work
on a piece of land ; now he was working entirely as
his own master. He thought that little farms of
fifteen or twenty acres were much needed, and also
one or two acre allotments ; but he did not believe
in men trying to farm five or six acres, which was
"neither hog nor mutton." People said to him, if
all had small holdings, where would the labour come
from ? " God bless my soul and body," said the old
gentleman, " can't we help each other ? " The
payment for ploughing made to the higgler he
thought the severest strain on the small holder.
The men came to him to complain, " The higgling
hits you hardest, bor."

A worker on five acres — risen from the soil and
looking still almost a part of it — was good enough
to go through with us the items of his budget. He
had an acre of allotment land on which this year he
had grown roots and potatoes, two acres of County
Council land and two acres of land from Mr. Winfrey.
On one of these he had grown oats and barley at a
net profit of £8 ; on the other, wheat, with a net
profit of £6. He kept three cows, and had just
bought a fourth ; sold butter to the extent of some
los. a week, and kept four pigs also. His chief
necessity was more land. It was the necessity of all.

Nordelph stretches along the side of the great
dyke, and huddles in a kind of discoloured nest by
the bridge over it. Two buildings— the Church and
the Methodist Chapel — stand out from the mass of
crumbling cottages. The whole place gives an
overpowering impression of forlornness and decay.

THE OLD AND THE NEW 103

It has neither beauty nor desirableness, pride nor
grace. It forms a kind of sanitary reformer's night-
mare. The dykes serves as water supply and main
sewer combined. The cottages are clogged into a
kind of warren instead of being spread out over the
level land. Mr. Winfrey was kind enough to give
me some particulars as to their condition. Within a
quarter of a mile of the bridge are seventy cottages,
of which fifty- three have less than three bedrooms ;
forty- three have two, and ten have only one. In
one case (perhaps the worst, but not extravagantly
different from others), ten people are living in two
bedrooms, the largest room 12 by 12 by 6 ft. They
include the father and mother, two sons, fifteen and
ten years old, five daughters, twenty-two, nineteen,
seven, six, two and a half, and a grandchild one and
a half years old. Six sleep in one room, and four
in the other. They have plenty of work and good
money, but " to get another house means leaving the
parish." The landlord is a Justice of the Peace.

I saw the sanitary arrangements in some of these
cottages — the closets within five feet of the front
doors, and within ten feet of the front doors of the
houses opposite ; ash-pits at the side of the closets,
and soft water tanks two feet from the ash-pits. In
others, the cesspools have to be emptied through the
houses. In others there are no cesspools, and the
closets are on the edge of the river.

Such is the housing in these crumbling Norfolk
villages. Dr. Crosse's report on the neighbouring
hamlets reveals that there is nothing exceptional
about Nordelph. Small wonder that disease is
endemic in their crowded and pitiful homes. And
work is plentiful, and all the surrounding earth
richly bringing forth her increase. The investigator

104 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

starting upon examination of rural England, thinks
that the question to be answered is : " Why do so
many go ? " Before he has concluded, he will find
the query more perplexing, " Why do any stay ? "

I wish I could bring before you the impression
this afternoon as we stood in the sunshine in the
little open space before the bridge, with the still
water on one side and the forlorn village on the
other; with the little eager crowd which had gathered
round on the news that Mr. Winfrey had arrived,
gazing at the great motor, an intruder from another
world, from that world of efficiency and progress of
which they had no knowledge or share. He is
building two cottages on his land, and the demand
for them was great. There was the possibility
of the news coming of fresh land available. One
could see that his energy and help had stirred
the village into the force of action, and was slowly
making the dry bones live. They wanted to contest
the County Council seat, and put in a Progressive ;
but that meant finding a man of means ; and where
could the man of means be found ? They all wanted
the new cottages, but readily acquiesced in the fairest
policy — the putting of the names in a hat and the
drawing out of the two lucky winners. Everything
as I stood there seemed against them : the mournful,
low, unhealthy land, the huddled, decaying houses,
the absence of leadership, the remoteness from all
the life and clean energy of the world. Hope had
indeed come — almost by chance — to Nordelph, and
to-morrow there would not be the same as yesterday.
But I saw a vision of a thousand Nordelphs, outside
the limits of this solitary County Council experiment.
A near hamlet, fired to sudden hope by the astonish-

THE OLD AND THE NEW 105

ing news of its neighbour's success, had petitioned
for a similar beneficence. The petition had passed
eighteen months ago to a Council far away at
Norwich. Nothing had been done, and the people
had settled down again to sleep.

I could not admire sufficiently the forces which
still made resistance to the corroding apathy and
despair ; the road mender and field preacher who
had inspired the men to continued courage ; the
holders who were building their little sheds and
gathering in their little harvests, and bringing up
their children in hope of better times ; all who in
these neglected places amid the long dominance of
the reaction, and in their crowded, decaying cottages
had fought disease, and exercised thrift, and reared
children, and clung to the last rags of decency and
honour, and hoped always for the miracle which at
last had come to pass, in the triumph of the effort
of reform.

But never, as here, have I so longed for the coming
of some such change as that brought by Mr. Wells's
Comet ; with the great burning of all useless and
unclean things when sanity returned among the
children of men. To clear this congested mass
bodily into the river or consume it in one gigantic
bonfire! And to give all these people a chance;
in houses which could be made into homes, where
children could be raised clean and vigorous in body
and in mind ! The old longing, born of impatience
at the slow courses of change, to shatter into bits the
sorry scheme of things, and then " remould it nearer
to our heart's desire."

We returned through Cambridgeshire and the
fruit country, a region which has been transformed

106 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

in less than a generation into a huge garden 01
manifest and growing prosperity. Round Wisbech,
as at Evesham, the fruit growing has proved the
salvation of the small holder, and stayed the rural
exodus. I saw land bought fifteen years ago for
£33 an acre, and planted with fruit trees, now worth
£150 an acre. I interviewed a holder of five acres
purchased at .£200 an acre, who was rejoicing over
an exceptionally prosperous season. I saw the trees
bent down with such an apple harvest as the memory
of man cannot parallel ; the great masses of red and
yellow trees all golden and splendid in the afternoon
sunshine. I found them picking and packing for
the Glasgow market, and everywhere a sense of
satisfaction and rejoicing at the benignant autumn
weather, and the generous bounty of the kindly
fruits of the earth.

We drove home over the level land straight into
the evening sunset ; past orchards of apple and plum
and pear, and new cottages springing up, and every
sign of a growing comfort ; through Wisbech, with
its narrow, crooked streets, and the slow, shining
river ; out into the open land, with the bright orange-
coloured wagons on the roadside, and the corn
stacks everywhere proclaiming a rich plenty ; past
little villages with the little churches and the weather-
cocks on their spires, and the red Methodist chapels,
and the little cottage gardens gay with late hollyhocks
and sunflowers ; through Thorney, with its ruined
abbey and its model houses under their great trees ;
and across the long stretch of deserted fen. Until in
the distance a smudge of smoke grew on the darken-
ing horizon ; and tall chimneys, challenging the great
cathedral, proclaimed a return to the unquiet effort
of the cities ; where men can stand upright ; unafraid.

VII

HOPE AND THfc FUTURE

"THE mistake they made," says Mr. Paul in his
" History of Modern England," " was to neglect
allotments, and dearly did they pay for it. ... It
would have been better to put off Home Rule for
a year than to give up * three acres and a cow/
They were, however, given up, and nothing was put
in their place except a Crofters Bill for Scotland,"
which, " excellent in itself, did not take the place of
a general Allotment Bill."

The result of this neglect of " the social issue, more
social than political, upon which Lord Salisbury had
been defeated," was ruin even to the Home Rule
cause, to which it had been sacrificed. It was the
victory in the counties which saved the Liberal party
in 1885. It was the disaster in the counties which
destroyed the Liberal party in 1886.

" It was in the English counties," says the historian
again, " that the most conspicuous reverse was seen.
* Three acres and a cow ' had proved a mockery.
The only acres now mentioned were the acres of
the Irish landlords, and there was no cow. Small
London wits had sneered at the political capacity
of the agricultural labourer. Both in 1885 and in
1886 he showed himself very keenly alive to his own

10T

108 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

political interests. On the former occasion the
English counties returned 152 Liberals and 101
Conservatives. This time the Liberals were 83 and
the Conservatives 170. . . . In the northern counties,
where agriculture was less predominant, the Liberals
held their own."

History never repeats itself, but there are singular
resemblances between the situation of to-day and
that of twenty years ago.

Once again the Liberal party has swept rural
England upon a "social issue, more social than
political." Once again the Irish question is big on
the horizon. Once again a year has passed — one
sixth, perhaps one-fifth, of the allotted life of Par-
liament— and nothing has been done for the rural
labourer. Once again a Crofters Bill for Scotland
is presented, which, "excellent in itself," cannot
" take the place of a general Allotment Bill."

The countryside has been stirred into political
energy and hope, as it has not been stirred for a
generation. Wherever I have journeyed, north,
south, east, and west, I have found the villagers
looking eagerly towards the new Government for
the policy which they so ardently desire. They have
fought manfully for the victory of the Progressive
cause. They have made themselves enemies and
undergone persecution in the work for its triumph.
They have confronted the sneers of those who ask
them continually what return or betterment they
expect to get from a Liberal party, which imme-
diately it attains power will throw them over for
other interests.

To-day they still refuse to believe in the possibility
of such a betrayal.

All their hopes gather round the land. The pro-

HOPE AND THE FUTURE 109

vision of direct access to the land is the one pathway
to freedom, comfort, security. So confident are they
in the promises of politicians that I have found men
modifying their plans, keeping sons at home, or
making preparations for seed and stock, because
they are sure that the better time is coming at
last.

This land hunger, and the success of the small man
where the land hunger has been satisfied, are facts
which I could not believe till I had seen them.

In my own village in the South Country allot-
ments were offered and abandoned. All desire for
independence appears to have vanished from the
labourer. I doubt if ten men would apply for hold-
ings if they were offered to them. The older men
work contentedly for good wages for the large
farmers ; the younger men slip quietly away to the
big city.

But I have seen enough to know that this con-
dition is not normal. Even in the feudal village the
desire for the land and for independence on it may
be aroused once again. In large tracts of England
it is the one vital question. The inhabitants are not
thinking of Home Rule or Tariff Reform or National
Education. There is for these but one question —
How to get more land.

And when they get it, they somehow make it pay.

I doubt to-day if " Back to the Land " can mean
any large return from the cities. This can only be
proved by experiment and experience. But I am
entirely convinced that the liberation of the land is
the one thing, and the one thing only, which can
keep the people in the country.

I have seen the small holdings created by the

110 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

energy of the villagers in the heart of the Wiltshire
Downs ; created by a County Council in Worcester-
shire and in Norfolk ; created by a Parish Council
under the Malvern Hills and by another on the
borders of Birmingham ; created on the lands in
Lincolnshire by our present Minister of Agriculture.
I have seen them on poor land and on good, near
and remote from markets, buying their land or hiring
it, building their houses or buying the houses built
for them. I have found a life of variable hardness
and austerity ; many requirements, some discontent.
But in all I have found rents regularly paid ; a rise
instead of a fall of the population of the parish ;
pauperism diminished ; and a spirit abroad of inde-
pendence and of enterprise which one can seek for
in vain in the sleek, comfortable, model villages of

Feudal England.

• ' • t • •

I have before me, through the courtesy of its
officers, the complete and most illuminating series of
reports of the Co-operative Small Holdings Society,
covering practically all the small-holding villages in
England. They vary enormously in prosperity and
success. But these features are common to all.

They are scattered far and wide, through Southern
England from Cornwall to Norfolk. They are tiny
oases in the midst of the normal system of landlord,
farmer, and landless labourer. They deal not with
" allotments " of half an acre or less, designed to
anchor the labourer on the soil by giving him profit-
able employment digging in the evenings, but with
the ladder of hope by which alone the labourer from
the first cultivation of small pieces of land can advance
to complete economic stability.

Here is Verwood, in Dorset, where the labourers

HOPE AND THE FUTURE 111

were allowed to lease portions of the moorland at a
rent of IDS. an acre, and a guarantee that it should
not be raised against them ; and have now reclaimed
it, and grow produce on it for the Bournemouth
market, twelve miles away. Here is the famous Rew
farm experiment near Dorchester, in the midst of a
declining agricultural district, where Sir Robert
Edgcumbe cut up a small farm, and is selling it in
plots to the purchasers. It(is land in most ways
unsuitable for small holders, and the success is but
qualified. Yet, although "the place gave one a
feeling of desperate struggle, hard work, and
poverty," the investigator noted also "a spirit of
independence and happiness at working for them-
selves which seemed to compensate for everything."

Or the estate in the New Forest, which Mr. Eyre
has cut up into small holdings, and so stayed the
flight to the cities : where the common rights in the
forest and the large keeping of stock have maintained
prosperity. And the estate of Mr. Harris at Halwell,
in North Devon, where small holdings were created
" largely by taking small bits of land off the larger
farms and adding them to adjoining cottages " ; and
while the population in all Devon has gone down
30 per cent, the population of this parish has gone
up 80 per cent. Or the holdings in the Far Forest,
where the clergyman is organising co-operation in
the dairy and the purchase of foodstuffs and manures;
and the County Council has been petitioned to ac-
quire land and relet it to holders and reports no
land in the market ; and the small holder pays from
£2 to £4 per acre for the same land which is let to
the large farmer at from 135. to 2os.

Here is Calstock, from which forty years ago a
farmer journeyed to London, and seeing the price

112 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

obtainable for early fruit at Covent Garden, was
convinced that he could grow it as good in Cornwall;
where now, on poor, stony land the small holders
grow paying crops in their warm and sheltered
valley ; and 107 small holders out of 423 started as
labourers or the sons of labourers. Here is the
wonderful success of fruit, market-gardens, and
asparagus round Evesham, where in soil, in places
good, but sometimes indifferent, aided by the com-
petition of two railways, and the prevalence of the
" Evesham custom " of secure compensation for im-
provement, a whole district has been changed into a
fertile and prosperous garden.

Here, again, is the Norfolk Association of the
Norfolk members of Parliament buying poor land
in remote Norfolk parishes, and letting it out to
the villagers ; as at Whissonsett, six miles from a
station, a typical decaying East county village, where
the population had fallen from 666 to 450. And here
in an extract from the report of the audit dinner is
some evidence of the response which will be made if
only the chance is given : —

" Mr. Nelson, one of the tenants, said that he, as a
tenant, should like to express his thanks to the
Norfolk Small Holdings Association for procuring
these farms and cutting them up for the small
holdings, which had been such a great benefit to
them all. * I remember the time/ he went on,
'when I had not a bit of straw, and had to go
and cut a bit of grass to bed my horse with, while
the pigs were wallowing in manure and water. I
hope it will not be long before we have larger hold-
ings. If the Association could see their way clear to
buy or hire more land, they would have no difficulty
in letting it.'

HOPE AND THE FUTURE 113

" Mr. Girling : I agree ; we would take as much
again, if we had the chance.

" Mr. Long : I should be pleased to double my
holding.

" Mr. Buscall : I would like an acre or two more.

" Mr. Lakey : I could do with five or six acres
more.

" Mr. A. E. Strongroom : I could do with some,
too. t

u Mr. G. Brown : I believe there would be some
more join the Club if you had the land to offer them.

" Mr. Nelson : Several now wish they had made an
application at first."

The land for which they appeal is there — all
around them. Their " doing with it " and " taking
it " means nothing of violence or confiscation. They
are willing to pay the price for it at which it is let
in large farms. They are willing to pay more than
the price at which it is let in large farms. They are
willing to hire it from Council or public body at a
rent which will pay not only the interest on the
purchase price, but the purchase price itself. So
that through their energy and toil, in fifty years'
time the land which to-day is in private ownership
will pass back again into the absolute possession of
the community. If only they are given a chance !

I have tried to tell of the things which I have
seen in rural England. I have shown the dark
side as well as the bright. I have never pretended
that the giving of direct access to the land was
anything more than a beginning. I have noted
the frequent hardness of life, the failure of co-
operation, the absence of skill and enterprise, the

114 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

lack of a social ideal ; if I have noted also the
freedom and vigour and hope which such a change
has brought into the forlorn villages of England.
But given this beginning I have faith that the other
things will follow. The English agricultural labourer
cannot escape in a day — perhaps not in a generation
— from the consequences of his degradation in the
long poverty and serfdom of a century. Give him a
chance in the country as to-day he has a chance in
the town, and he will show you in the country as
effectually as he is showing in the town the qualities
which make for human well-being. If not in himself
yet in his children, developments of skill and com-
bination will assuredly follow the start for which he
is now waiting.

This great opportunity is challenging the energies
of the party of reform. It is the challenge of a
national policy. In these crumbling cottages and
dwindling villages are being fought out the destinies
and future of an Imperial race. Those who oppose
reform with the forces of inertia and prejudice, or
who scorn reform here as parochial while they gaze
over wide horizons, are scorning the remedy for
disease at the vital heart of Empire.

In this present Parliament — in legislation fearless
and far-reaching — a Government with energy and
insight and imagination could set in motion forces
which within a lifetime would transform the country-
side, and re-establish this people of England in their
own land.

PART III

TOWARDS A POLICY

"WHAT WE WANT"

BY F. N. ROGERS, M.P.

THE prominence given of late to Irish legislation
and temperance reform in the forecasts for the work
of next Session is provoking some measure of uneasi-
ness in the minds of those in touch with rural con-
stituencies in England. It is not that the devolution
of Irish Government and the prevention of alcoholism
are regarded as anything but highly desirable objects
for the attention of Parliament. But Governments
and Parliaments move slowly. Reforms precede
and follow one another. If one subject is taken
up another is perforce postponed, and our expe-
rience tells us that it is generally rural aspirations
that have to wait. Governments are urban in their
sympathies. Their members represent urban con-
stituencies ; the Press which supports and influences
them is urban in its character and its scope. The
grievances of a suburb attract more notice and
receive more attention than the silent, unvocal
decay of an English countryside.

What is k, then, that our rural Liberals want from
this House of Commons, and why do we want it?
As to the why and wherefore. Everybody knows
that rural England is being depopulated, that much
of the land is imperfectly cultivated, that houses are

117

118 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

too few and too bad, that in many districts land is
" tumbling down " to rough pasture with disastrous
results to all classes. These evils are patent to all,
and diverse are the reasons given, still more diverse
the remedies suggested.

To the writer the main cause of the decay of rural
life is its lack of opportunity. Much might be
written, no doubt, on the dulness of village life, the
want of recreation and intellectual movement ; but
by lack of opportunity I mean, above all, the lack
of material, money-getting opportunity. It is this,
above all, which drives the young men away. It is
here that the intervention of Parliament is most of
all required. The rest will follow. Agricultural
labourers, from whom the main exodus comes,
share in the common aspirations of the working
classes. They want better conditions of labour,
more leisure, better wages, a larger share in the
wealth they create and in the opportunities that
wealth can be made to provide. Trade unionism
has never taken root amongst them. They do not
organise to improve their lot. They leave. The
most energetic seek those chances in life which
the powers that be in their village deny them.
The rest wait patiently for legislation. Their most
deeply-seated and widespread conviction is that
the salvation of their class lies in the land, not as
hired labourers merely, but as cultivators of some
modest portion of it for themselves. The agrarian
movement in rural England is the counterpart of the
Labour movement in the towns. It has its roots in
the same causes, it is fed by the same ugly facts of
industrial life, and Parliament has to it the same
duty of recognition and sympathy.

The concrete form which the movement takes in

"WHAT WE WANT" 119

Wiltshire is the desire for a larger and cheaper
supply of small holdings of land, at a fair rent,
with proper security of tenure, and of a size suit-
able for the occupation of men with small capital
and frequently having some other occupation.

This is what we want the Government to do for
us, and we do not want our needs to be pushed aside
by other reforms, however desirable they be. We
want to share and share ^alike. In some villages
much of the land is already let in this manner.
Where the system prevails you find less pauperism,
more energy and alertness of mind, more widespread
well-being, and more independence of character.
High as the rents are, where these small holdings
prevail a ladder does exist for a careful and thrifty
man to climb to a condition of greater independence.
It is this ladder that ought to exist in every English
village. What might not English rural life become
if every parish possessed a belt of small allotments
of land immediately surrounding its cluster of
cottages, available for the men who really meant
to try, with good hopes of working out their lives
towards some other goal than that of " parish pay '
at the end? Critics will say that that is all very
well in favoured districts, where soil and climate and
markets are favourable ; but that in the normal dis-
tricts (and that is where they all seem to live) a small
occupier would simply have to work much harder
than a labourer for a more uncertain and possibly a
smaller wage

The first answer to this is that much depends on
the rent. If a small holder is paying a rent three
or four times in proportion to that paid by a large
tenant, owing to the fact that competition forces up
the rent far beyond the agricultural value of the land

120 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

then it is obvious that the test is not a fair one, and
that only by a Land Court, or by bringing more
small holdings into the market by legislation, can
the proper conditions of success be secured. But
given a fair rent, the real answer to the criticism is
that a small holder with anything from two to twelve
acres of average land does not depend solely on his
land for a livelihood. He has some other means of
living; perhaps a small business, or is engaged in
some of the casual but skilled occupations which
every village contains. Out of a colony of nine
small holders known to the writer, one is a car-
penter and wheelwright, one a roadman, one a
baker, two are hay and straw tiers and sheep
shearers, one a coal hawker, one a thatcher and
woodman, one a pensioner, and one a postman.
The trade or business and the holding work in
together, gaps of unemployment are filled by work
on or about the land, and capital visibly grows.
Apart from the special districts where special crops
can be grown, and where intensive spade cultivation
is economically successful, a supply of small holdings
as a reserve against unemployment, a natural bank
for savings, an adjunct to a trade, and an incentive to
thrift, is an invaluable factor in the economic life of
a village.

The weakest point of these holders is in buying
and selling. They buy too dear and they sell too
cheap. Leisure is insufficient for constant attendance
at markets and sales, and frequently they sell to a
creditor, a bargain which is apt to prove a bad one
for the debtor. Eventually the spread of co-opera-
tive principles will cure this. It is the small holder
of land, above all, who will gain by co-operative
agricultural trading.

"WHAT WE WANT" 121

The Central London Unemployed body, so I read,
is preparing large schemes for the coming winter.
"These schemes comprise the erection of 100
cottages for training at Hollesley Bay, at an
approximate cost of .£15,000 ; the erection of
greenhouses, forcing beds, and so forth, at an esti-
mated cost of £2,690 ; maintenance of colony with
350 men for six months, which would affect between
700 and 800 men, as each man would probably be
given about twelve weeks' work."

It is, no doubt, an admirable scheme, reflecting
much credit on the determination of the body to
deal resolutely with a great evil. But does it not
sometimes occur to our people, and more particu-
larly to our Legislature, that it would be both
cheaper and more effective to keep on the land
those already there, who, without "training and
maintenance for six months," possess the necessary
knowledge of rural pursuits, but who, as a matter of
fact, are steadily leaving the country as fast as they
can to find elsewhere an outlet for their labour and
an opportunity for their life's work? Since their
childhood they have lived on the soil. All their
skill is in rural handicrafts and knowledge of the
varied work of the farm. Would not it be even
possible that in the hoped for "colonisation of
England" they would prove more successful
pioneers than unemployed townsmen, trained at
great expense, and probably ignorant of the most
elementary facts of rural life? With one set of
laws we are driving population wholesale into the
towns ; with another we are beginning to teach at
enormous expense to a minute fraction of it such
rudiments of nature as will enable it to return. The
pity and the wastefulness of it all !

122 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Now, before the progressive energy of this Parlia-
ment is spent cannot we get from it machinery such
as this — powers to a County Council to hire com-
pulsorily, without restrictions on acreage, land for
the purpose of small holdings, to make advances
from a grant from the Consolidated Fund for build-
ings and fencing, watering, &c., such advances to be
made good by addition to the rent?

For the initiative I would trust the Parish Council
to petition the County Council, as in the Allotments
Clauses of the Act of 1894, a strikingly successful
piece of legislation, and it should be obligatory
("shall," not "may") on the County Council to
hold an inquiry when so petitioned.

Finally, at the centre there should be a permanent
body of Small Holdings Commissioners charged
with the duty of ensuring that fullest opportuni-
ties be given by the local authorities to establish
small holdings according to local requirements and
wherever local conditions are not hopelessly adverse.
And I should like to see the annual vote for the
expenses of this Commission criticised according to
the number of English families that in the course of
the year they have settled on that most undeveloped
of all Imperial estates, the soil of our own country.

It will be something of a tragedy in the history of
the Liberal Party, and a disappointment past expres-
sion to its most earnest supporters, if this present
opportunity be not used to the full to realise our
desires. We want a Land Bill, and we want it, as
Hilda Wangel says, "on the table."

THE LAND HUNGER

BY R. WINFREY, M.P.

THE question is being asked of the great Progressive
majority in Parliament, " What are you going to do
for rural England ? "

We have made some little progress since the
extension of the franchise in 1885, it is true ; but it
is so very little, that unless the pace is accelerated
we shall all be in our graves before the problem has
been seriously grappled with. The only advantage
of the last twenty years of " marking time " is that
we can see more clearly the absolute necessity for
drastic land reform, and, therefore, we ought now
to be able to take with us the landed section of
the Liberal Party, and even the Tory social re-
former.

The time is fully ripe to grasp the nettle, like men
of mettle, and adopt a whole-hearted policy of
getting the people back to the land.

And when I say getting the people back to the
land, I must not be misunderstood. Except in rare
cases, I am not an advocate of bringing people back
from the towns to country life. What I want to do for

the next twenty years is to give every country-born

123

124 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

son of the soil a fair opportunity of remaining in his
native district, and of acquiring by degrees enough
land to live upon, a decent house to live in, and a
system of co-operation which will ensure to him the
fruit of his labours. If that is done we immediately
start to re-people the rural districts, and we stop the
exodus into the towns.

Those who have already migrated to the towns
must stay there, with few exceptions. We have
two young men on our small holdings in Lincoln-
shire who have given up town life and returned to
help their father on thirty acres of land, and they
will probably marry and settle down with us, and
we shall establish them as small holders. But
ninety-nine out of one hundred who have gone out
from the country cannot, for one reason or another,
return. Indeed, the time that would be occupied in
bringing them back can be much more profitably
employed in finding places in the country for every
young man already there who is prepared to marry,
settle down, and cultivate the land.

I have just caused the following advertisement to
appear in a local newspaper :

SOUTH LINCOLNSHIRE SMALL HOLDINGS
ASSOCIATION.

THE above Association is prepared to receive APPLICA-
TIONS from Persons residing in the several Parishes
in South Lincolnshire, who are desirous of HIRING SMALL
HOLDINGS up to 60 Acres in extent, either with or without
houses.

Forms of application will be sent on receipt of a postcard
addressed to the Steward, Mr. J. H. DIGGLE, Moulton,
Spalding. All information will be treated as confidential.

R. WINFREY,
Chairman,

THE LAND HUNGER 125

The result already is that applications have been
received for two thousand acres of land, and still the
applications come pouring in.

What we want is speedy — I say speedy advisedly
— access to the land, and hundreds of new houses
erected fit to rear families in.

The question for the Government is : " How
quickly and how thoroughly can it be done ? "

Well, if we take past land legislation as our guide,
we shall make a fresh start on new and drastic
lines.

In 1885, I remember well Mr. Henry Chaplin
saying that a quarter of an acre was enough for a
working man; in 1887 he advanced a stage, and
supported the Tory Allotment Act, limiting the
quantity to an acre. But that Act was hardly
worth the paper it was written on, for it put upon
the Boards of Guardians the duty of supplying the
land if they could obtain it from the landowner by
voluntary means.

The labourers of South Lincolnshire sent in
2,000 applications for one-acre lots, and in two
years they secured a paltry twenty acres. And
any one who knows the composition of a rural
Board of Guardians might easily have foretold the
result. There is no secret about it; the majority
of Guardians are farmers, or under the thumbs of
the farmers, and even to-day they are not converted
in their hearts to the value of allotments from the
farming point of view. At any rate, there is no
enthusiasm — no propelling force.

And when the Allotment Amendment Act of
1890 was passed giving the County Councils com-
pulsory powers if the Boards of Guardians failed,
it made matters very little better, for in nine cases

126 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

out of ten the same class of men had the adminis-
tration of the law in their hands.

The Parish Councils Act was a distinct improve-
ment, and in the open parishes (by open, I mean
where the cottages belong to a number of owners,
and not to two or three landlords, and large enough
to get a majority of working men and small shop-
keepers on the Parish Council), the allotment clauses
of the Act have been fairly administered. But here,
again, if voluntary methods fail — and in quite half
the cases they do fail — the compulsory powers are
left with the County Councils, and the power comes
back to the same class of men, who, if they dare not
make a frontal attack, in preventing the acquisition
of land, do it all the same by raising a thousand and
one petty objections.

Then when we come to the Small Holdings Act of
1892, there is no improvement — rather the reverse;
the power rests with the unsympathetic County
Council, and there are no compulsory clauses, so
between one and the other it is almost a miracle
if a small holding is secured.

Fourteen years have elapsed since the passing of
that Act, and what a melancholy record ! Only
eight County Councils in England have acquired
land under its provisions. The total area of land
so acquired has only been 569 acres, which means
practically an average of forty acres a year since the
passing of the Act, and the total number of men
placed on the land under its provisions has been
1 66, or an average of twenty small holders a year.

I recently saw a report which had been prepared
for the Somersetshire County Council. The Clerk
of the Council had written round to all the other
County Councils asking what had been done under

THE LAND HUNGER 127

the Small Holdings Act. I noticed, amongst others,
that the report from the Isle of Ely County Council
was to the effect that it had not been found prac-
ticable to put the Act into operation. Such a report
is, of course, to those of us who know, ridiculous in
the extreme. The Isle of Ely is a most fertile district,
and many of the parishes are specially adapted for
small holdings. Indeed, in one of the parishes that
I call to mind at the moment, called Manea, there has
been such a struggle for land that the rents are up
to £3 and £4 per acre, and I know from some of
the parishes in this locality applications have been
sent in to the Isle of Ely County Council. Land
is frequently coming into the open market, and
might be purchased by the authority, yet nothing
has been done, and one has only to know the
personnel of this County Council to understand
very clearly why the Act has not been put into
operation. It is a County Council made up largely
of farmers.

I expect we shall have another illustration of
the same thing at Ramsey, in Huntingdonshire,
where Lord de Ramsey has turned out some eight
hundred allotment tenants because of some trivial
dispute. An appeal has been made to .the Hunts
County Council to provide small holdings ; they
have held an inquiry, received the applications of
the men, come to the conclusion that there is no
land in the market, and that is how that matter will
be allowed to subside, unless pressure can be brought
to bear from some outside source.

Further, although a small percentage of land has
been supplied under the Allotment Acts, the Parish
Councils Act, and the Small Holdings Act, no
houses and buildings have been provided whatever

128 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

so that it is only the men who are already house-
holders, and who live near the land so acquired,
whose wants have been in any way met by these
Acts of Parliament.

Whilst these pettifogging methods have been
going on thousands of young men have left the
country, never to return, for the want of a decent
home and a bit of land attached to it.

So the housing problem must go hand in hand
with the small holding problem, and the Govern-
ment have to face the fact that public money and
public credit must be provided for both.

We must do for England what we have done for
Ireland, and what we are proposing to do for
Scotland under the Small Landowners Bill.

Above all, Parliament, which represents the
people, must be the propelling force. This question
must be solved from the centre. A new public
department must be set up, or a new branch of
the Board of Agriculture created, and Commis-
sioners appointed with knowledge, tact, and deter-
mination to see this great work accomplished during
the next twenty years. The Commissioners must
be responsible directly to Parliament, and the nation
must find the money and the credit to accomplish
the work.

It is no use trusting in such a vital matter as
this to the chance of a friendly County Council or
District Council — the very men who want land are
not on those bodies and are not likely to get there ;
and the men who are there, or the vast majority of
them, are not honestly in favour of this movement.
We have an illustration of this in the Holland
(Lincolnshire) County Council. Whilst we had
a Progressive majority on that Council we secured

THE LAND HUNGER 129

three farms for small holding purposes. For twelve
years these small holdings have been a success,
the rents, which are punctually paid, cover the
repayment of principal and interest, and the rate-
payers have not been asked for a farthing, and yet
now that a majority of Tory farmers predominate
the Council, although frequent applications have
been sent in to them by men requiring small
holdings in other parishes, nothing has been done
to continue a policy which every one admits has been
successful. It is this experience which has taught
me the lesson that we shall never colonise England
and get the people back to the land, or decent
houses built, through the instrumentality of local
public bodies. The question must be dealt with
as a national one, and the work must proceed under
the eye of Parliament itself.

Ill

THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS

BY ARNOLD HERBERT, M.P.

To Colonise England ! It is a striking phrase, and
striking phrases are liable to incline practical folks
to incredulity. They recall the unpractical ideals of
writers who describe the mountains cultivated to their
tops ; and they turn with abhorrence from the notion
that our beautiful countryside is to be converted into
an endless series of allotments disfigured by tumble-
down sheds and unsavoury pigsties.

What is it, then, that we really mean by the
phrase? It is that, while preserving the character
of our country with its opportunities of enjoyment
and of sport, it shall be made to maintain the people
upon it in better conditions, and that a career shall
be opened to those who dwell in the country, with
a prospect of raising themselves and bettering their
conditions without leaving the place of their birth.

What prospect at present is there before the
agricultural labourer? However steady and com-
petent a man he is, can he look forward to anything
better than earning his fixed weekly wage, so long
as he is fit for work, and in the end becoming an
inmate of the workhouse ? That is not good enough

130

THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS 131

for the rising generation in the country, and that is
why they flock to the towns.

There were enough subjects in all conscience to
talk about at the General Election ; but, according
to my experience in the rural districts, no subject
was listened to with more rapt attention, nothing
aroused greater interest than the exposition of a
scheme of land reform which would open a career
to the villagers in the country they know and love
so well.

The subject may be conveniently dealt with under
the two headings of— (i) Allotments ; (2) Small
Holdings; (3) The General Conditions of the Tenure
of Land.

(i) Allotments.

These cannot be looked upon as in themselves
opening a career to the labourer. They are merely
an amelioration of existing conditions. The function
of allotments is not to raise produce for sale, but
only for the supply of the holder and his family.
In Bucks near the villages and small towns allot-
ments are very general, and I can say from experience
that they not only provide an addition to the table,
but in hard times they have stood between many
families and want.

Other counties are not so well off in the matter
of allotments, and it ought to be the universal rule
that an allotment is available for every villager, and,
I should like to add, for every dweller in a small
country town, who desired it. At the same time
the landlord, whether an individual or a local body,
ought to have and to exercise some control over
the way allotments are kept, so as to prevent them
being the unsightly objects they often are at present.
Thus, for instance, it ought not to be permissible to

132 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

an allotment holder to put up unsightly and tumble-
down tool sheds and pigsties.

(2) Small Holdings.

By this is meant such a holding as will occupy the
main part, or a very substantial part, of the time of
the tenant — say anything up to fifty acres.

Such holdings do exist in some parts, but generally
speaking they are not available to the labourer.

These small holdings are the crux of the matter.
It is they that would supply the career to the labourer
of character and enterprise ; and if they were made
available in reasonable quantities, not as a universal
rule, but as adjuncts in fair proportion to the larger
farms, they would not only stop the drain of the
best blood from the country, but they would be of
enormous value to the larger farmers by planting
round them a number of reliable men whose spare
time would be available for work on the larger farms.
Small holdings are intended to produce food for
sale, and it is not by any means everywhere that
small holdings could succeed. Climate, local con-
ditions, the proximity of markets, and the means
of transit must be all taken into consideration.
Therefore, although the power of obtaining land for
small holdings should be compulsory, it should only
be put into operation after the Board of Agriculture
had been satisfied that the conditions were such as
to render success probable.

Speaking generally, too, I think it hardly likely
that small holdings can succeed unless the holders
will avail themselves of the advantages of modern
commercial methods of buying and marketing pro-
duce involved in co-operation. Individual small
holders cannot hope to obtain from railway com-
panies, for irregular and uncertain consignments,

THE THREE PLANKS OF PROGRESS 133

rates that will compete with those granted to small
holders abroad, who, by co-operation, are able to
guarantee fixed quantities of produce packed in the
most advantageous manner.

The question, therefore, whether the probable
tenants of small holdings are of sufficient intelligence,
and are prepared to adopt the co-operative principle,
should be a material consideration in determining
whether compulsory powers of taking land for small
holdings should be put in operation.

Granted all that, I do not think any great success
for small holdings can be anticipated unless along
with the power of obtaining the land and the com-
mercial advantage of co-operation there is at the
same time made available the capital with which
to stock and work the holding. It is perfectly
illusory to say to a labourer, however steady and
capable, "You may obtain a small holding," unless
you also give him the chance of obtaining the work-
ing capital with which alone he can make it a
success.

What is required is to open to a man an oppor-
tunity of rising on his own character and his own
ability.

This can be done, and can only be done by the
simultaneous inauguration of agricultural banks,
which should be worked on the mutual credit system,
upon the lines of the Raiffeisen Banks in Germany.
A man's own neighbours, who would form the com-
mittee of the bank to whom he would have to apply
for a loan, know his capacity better than anybody
else ; and if they were willing to accept the scheme
of working he laid before them, and to make him an
advance of their own money upon the security of the
success of that scheme, there would thus be provided

134

TO COLONISE ENGLAND

the best guarantee for the practical and successful
working of the system of small holdings.

We are far behind other nations in the organisation
of agriculture. It is only organisation that is re-
quired. But we must be ready to learn from the
experience of others, and not allow sentiment to lead
us into unpractical schemes destined to failure.

If, however, we afford the chance of obtaining
small holdings, and simultaneously introduce the
principle of co-operation in buying and marketing
produce, and also in supplying the necessary capital
upon business terms, we may fairly expect to bring
about a revolution in rural life in England.

I say nothing about my third heading, viz., the
general conditions of the tenure of land ; but it may
be taken as certain that a generation which had
learnt to apply modern commercial methods to
agriculture, and to make small holdings a succe<
would not long be content to be hampered by the
antiquated restrictions of the present system ol
tenure.

THE LANDLESS LABOURER

BY E. G. LAMB, M.P.

" THE conscious human efforts do so much less than
the unconscious ones," said my old friend the Pro-
fessor. " I am inclined to think something might
have been done to retain the yeoman, but I doubt if
you can bring into existence a class of small holders.
Nevertheless, I will consider any such proposal with-
out prejudice."

And that is all we land reformers ask. I should
like to believe it possible that so great a question as
the re-establishment of the people of England on the
soil of England might be permitted to remain outside
party strife, but I know that whichever party shall
be credited with doing it, or even with having made
an honest effort to do it, will have the representation
of the rural constituencies for many years.

I take it that we all agree that if a contented,
prosperous class of cultivators of the soil could be
called into being it would be well for the country. I
am not going to argue whether there is, or is not, a
demand for small holdings. Those of us who have
lived in touch with the agricultural labourer know
too well the unsatisfied land hunger that consumes

136 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

him. And there is the land to be had without inter-
fering with the farming industry. The small holder
cannot be multiplied ad infinitum everywhere. He
will want either work outside his holding or some
home industry. He will not compete with the farmer;
his methods of cultivation will be different ; but he
will sell his labour at a fair price, and it will be better
labour. I have no hesitation in affirming from per-
sonal experience that the small occupier is in intelli-
gence and industry far above the labourer who has
lived in a tied cottage, be they brothers. Unfortu-
nately, intelligence and independence are qualities
that have not been encouraged in rural England.

If all the land is not suitable neither are all the
men. Roughly speaking, wherever you find that
there are or have been squatters, there you will find
suitable land and the human material. Work on the
soil demands at least as much skill as, and more
perseverance than, any other industry. The con-
ditions may be hard. The reward is a free life in the
world as God made it.

In my opinion, men deported by public bodies as
surplus town population would be of no use as small
holders. (I am not expressing any opinion now as
to farm colonies.) We must look to the existing
rural population, and especially to their children. It
must never be forgotten that, though a question of
supreme national importance, the colonisation of
England will be determined by local conditions, not
only soil, climate, markets, and so on, but the
character of the people.

I take a parish in which I know every man, either
personally or by repute, and find that some 12 per
cent, of the labourers would, in my opinion, be able
to deal with a holding of from three to eight acres.

THE LANDLESS LABOURER 137

This may be thought a small percentage, but it will
do to begin with. Our population is less than three
hundred souls : I can find some eight men : we
should want to acquire less than one hundred acres,
and to borrow, say, ^"3,000 to build cottages. Rem
acu tetigimus, now comes the crux — What about the
money ? Men we have got : machinery we can get ;
but money ? Whence and how ?

The reason why so little have been done to carry
out the Small Holdings Act, 1892, is that there has
been no willingness to run the machinery, and no
power for the machine. The County Councils of
England, for the most part in rural England, repre-
sent the landowning and farming classes. Over the
walnuts and the wine is settled who shall represent
the people. Squire or farmer succeeds squire or
farmer. Both fear the emancipation of the serf, and
both fear the rates. If you propose to make the
County or District Councils the authority to carry
out a real Act to create small holdings, you must
create a new class of Councillors, and to do this you
must pay the Councillors their expenses, and a fair
day's wage. This is to democratise the local authori-
ties. But to effect small holdings I am inclined to
believe you must give power to the smallest unit, the
parish, because the parish is an historical and living
entity, and you can get direct evidence at a Parish
Council or parish meeting, where everybody knows
everybody else's affairs and capacities.

And what an outcry there will be ! " The rates
will go up ! " Now, there is no doubt that the
farmers of England have a legitimate ground for
complaint as to the incidence of rates. To put it
broadly, the farmer pays on more than his income,
and the business man on less. The matter is one for

138 TO COLONISE. ENGLAND

immediate settlement. The whole accumulated wealth
of the country should contribute to both national and
local needs. The income tax should be graduated,
and the assessment for income tax should be the
basis on which rates are levied. Granted this reform,
and we have the money needed to buy the land and
build the cottages.

In my opinion, the local authority should remain
the proprietor and the small holder be a tenant.
Peasant proprietorship is the counsel of perfection.
But you would have to make mortgage illegal, to
forbid subdivision, to prevent sale or sub-lease ;
which seems not possible. Retain the small holder,
therefore, as tenant, at a rent such as will give a fair
return on cost of land and buildings, plus insurance
of crops and stock : the holder to have security of
tenure as long as he pays such rent, and the right to
pass on his holding to a successor on the same terms,
the tenancy to terminate should he become in receipt
of parish relief. I believe the expenditure will be
profitable to the local authority. A small holder near
me pays £2 an acre for land that would not be worth
153. to farm. But a class of small holders would be
such an advantage to the nation morally that the
State can well afford to foster the movement.
Surely we can devote the equivalent of the cost
of one Dreadnought to start a National Agricul-
tural Bank.

I suppose I should conclude with some truism
about co-operation. The fact is that the British
agriculturist is the most individualistic of human
beings. Farmers continue to buy at retail prices and
sell at wholesale ; the agricultural labourer continues
to undersell his fellow in the labour market. Will
education and independence teach combination and

THE LANDLESS LABOURER 139

co-operation ? Let us get our small holdings first
and talk about the rest afterwards.

One thing the State must do : it must teach the
next generation to till the soil ; to dump down even
picked men into small holdings without some super-
vision, instruction, and financial help would be to
court failure. Their cultivation must be intensive,
and knowledge of intensive cultivation there is none.
Demonstration plots in suitable localities are an
absolute necessity; opportunity for advice should
be made easy ; patience must be illimitable.

I expect to hear, " Communal ownership is Social-
ism disguised," but we wish our small holders to live
individualistic lives. I expect to be told, " You tax
one class to benefit another," but I only desire all to
contribute, according to their means, to benefit the
nation. Some one will say, " This is a revolution ; "
my reply is, "It is to avert a revolution."

V
A PARISH MEETING

BY ATHELSTAN KENDALL, M.P.

EXTRACT from the minutes of the Hellburied Parish
Council, October i, 1906: —

" Resolved : That a parish meeting be called to consider
the question of the ' Colonisation of England/ the causes
which prevent it, and the methods which would forward it."

At the meeting which followed the passing of this
resolution Mr. John Wain, C.C., mason and local
preacher, took the chair at 7.30 as Chairman of the
Parish Council. There was a large attendance. The
Chairman read a letter from the Squire regretting
that he would not have finished dinner in time to
take the chair, but that he hoped to look in later on ;
also one from the Vicar, who said that evening service
would prevent his attendance. The Chairman said
that The Daily News desired to ventilate this ques-
tion, and he thought it their duty to help. He
believed that the labourer wanted land. Their boys
and girls wanted better and more practical education
until they were older. Young men and young
women wanted a club to go to in the evenings.
Labourers should have their cottages free of the fear
of losing them when they lost their employment.

A PAEISH MEETING 141

Cottages which were unfit for habitation should be
reported by the Parish Council to the District
Council. If the sanitary inspector agreed with the
Parish Council the landlord should not be allowed to
shut them and ruin the labourers, but should be com-
pelled to put them in order. (Cheers.) The medical
officer should not be a local practitioner, whose best
patients were the landowners, on whose property he
had to report. They should have free and indepen-
dent men to judge in these matters. They wanted
parsons who were friends of the poor, and not, as the
Bishop of Birmingham had just said, friends only of
the rich. They wanted squires who were ashamed of
the fact (or at least willing to apologise for it) that
they had never earned sixpence in their lives. They
wanted the best educated men in the parish to set an
example of hard work, thrift, sobriety, and tolerance
of other people's opinions. They wanted to compel
County Councils to find allotment and small holding
land when the Parish Councils asked for it. As
Chairman it was his business to open the meeting
and not make a speech, and this he had much
pleasure in doing.

Mr. William Brown, an old farmer, said he was
Tory born and bred, and his father before him. He
did not, as a rule, hold with anything new, but there
was certainly something wrong with the country
districts. He supposed they could not have Protec-
tion— (loud cries of " No ") — but something must be
done. He had held his farm, and his father before
him, for a matter of eighty years between them. He
had never seen his landlord in his life. Some man in
London wrote for his rent, and it was always paid to
the day. The rent was low enough, but he had to
do all repairs to the buildings himself. He had spent

142 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

hundreds of pounds on his holding. He held his land
on a yearly tenancy. A month ago he heard his land-
lord had died. A week ago he got notice to quit next
Michaelmas from the new owner. (Cries of " Shame ! ")
Was that right ? (Cries of " No.")

Mr. Jones, another farmer, said that a Tory Govern-
ment had passed a Land Purchase Bill, and made
the English taxpayers lend the Irish tenants a
hundred million pounds to buy their holdings. And
because this sum was not enough for the landlords
the Tory Government had made the English tax-
payers pay twelve millions more as a bribe to the
landlords to sell their land. As farmers had voted
Tory since the last flood, and probably would till the
next, why didn't the last Tory Government do some-
thing like that for the English farmers ? The reason
was that in Ireland the farmers always voted for what
they wanted, and against their landlords, and so they
got what they wanted. In England the farmers voted
for their landlords, and they got what the landlords
wanted. (Cheers.)

William Earl said he had five sons between four-
teen and twenty-one. He had advised them all to
go to a big town to get their living. He had been
an agricultural labourer for forty years, and had
never been able to save a farthing or keep out of
debt. He earned weekly at nineteen within a couple
of shillings of what he had ever earned since. It was
true he had a quarter of an acre "of allotment land
now, and that helped. But it was nigh being the
worst land in the parish. It was ij miles from his
work and his home. He paid twice as much for it as
any farmer thereabouts did. Unless a majority of
working men in the parish could force a landlord to
sell or let plenty of land to the Parish Council for

A PARISH MEETING 143

small holdings the labourers never would be free men.
The labourer on the land was the last man in the
industrial race. He wished he had left the village
years ago when he was fit. Now it was too late.
But his boys would not stay if he could help it.

John Wright said labourers wouldn't mind going
short of victuals if they could do any good by it.
But what was the use of saving £10 if you could not
get a bit of land to hold to and improve your circum-
stances ? He only knew of two holdings of under
ten acres within five miles, and there was no chance
of getting them for love or money. He had two
daughters and three sons, and a cottage with more
than two bedrooms was not to be got in the village.
Men left the villages because they wanted to live
decent, and a family like his could not be brought up
decent in most villages.

The Squire, who had listened to the last few
minutes of the discussion, said he was much shocked
at some of the speeches he had heard. Many men
there seemed discontented with their lot. They had
been put into the world to do their duty in such
positions as it had pleased God to call them to. He
tried to do his duty in the position to which he had
been called, and others should do the same. They
should submit to their lot, as he did, and make the
best of it. (Ironical cheers.) It was true he got up
when he liked and had breakfast when he liked, and
hunted and shot and kept a motor-car. But these
things all involved the employment of labour and the
circulation of wages. A disgraceful Bill, called the
"Land Tenure Bill," had been introduced into Parlia-
ment. This Bill proposed to let farmers invite their
friends to kill the rabbits on their landlords' farms ;
to make landlords pay compensation if the game did

144 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

any damage to the crops, and would force a landlord
to keep his tenants whether he liked to or not. What
would be the use of being a landlord if this Bill
passed, he would like to know ? All this disturbance
and discontent was the result of education and giving
workmen votes and parish councils. Allotments
took a man's interest away from his master's work,
and small holdings were no good to any one without
capital, and would not pay even then.

The Chairman said that as the Squire seemed
satisfied with things as they were, possibly he would
allow those who were not a chance of speaking.

Thomas Smith said village life generally meant
tyranny. They all remembered how Miss Drayton,
the teacher, had been dismissed from the school
because she would not go to school on Sundays. In
the next village the County Council put the parson's
wife on the school management committee, although
there were four Church persons (including the parson)
on already. In another village he knew the Noncon-
formist children were withdrawn from the Church
Catechism because the parson said the conscience
clause made the Tory Education Act a fair one.
When the summer came, the Nonconformist children
were not allowed to go to the school treat. They all
knew that after the last election the Dame-President
of the Primrose League had written to the grocer,
Mr. Hales, telling him he might send his bill in, and
saying she should not trade with him again because
he had voted Liberal. Next Sunday he had heard
she celebrated her conduct by going to church twice.
A man would never call his soul his own in country
districts till he could get some land on the credit of
the State, and then he would be able to stand up
against injustice and feel a man.

A PARISH MEETING 145

The Rector having meanwhile come in, the Chair-
man asked if he desired to make any remark.

The Rector said he was sorry more of the men in
the village did not come to church. He had heard
that the chairman once said of him at some Radical
meeting that the parson's chief friends ought to be
the poor, and he further said that he ought not to
keep a carriage, play golf, give and go to tennis
parties, ride to hounds, occasionally spend a month
in Switzerland in the summer, and go to dinner-
parties. The duty of the clergyman was to know his
flock, especially those whom Providence had called to
positions of affluence and importance in the parish.
He was often able to influence such persons to help
the poor and deserving, and this he could not do if
he did not meet them in the ways the chairman had
complained of. Clergymen of the Church of Eng-
land were not like Nonconformist ministers. They
were usually persons of gentle birth, and university
training, and they naturally made friends with their
equals, and not their inferiors. He confessed he did
not know why such a meeting as this should be called,
or what the " Colonisation of England " meant. He
did his best to keep the people in the parish by
preaching the gospel of contentment with our lot,
and distributing the village charities. (A Voice :
" To Church people.") These discussions do no
good, but a lot of harm. They made men become
discontented. Radicals and Socialists had no respect
for landlords or property. He begged to announce
that he should preach next Sunday on the subject of
ordering ourselves lowly and reverently before our
betters. He begged to wish them good-night.

It being now late, the Chairman called on Parish
Councillor Jones to propose a resolution, as follows :

146 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

" This public meeting of the inhabitants of Hellburied
records its opinion that in this parish there is wanted :
Firstly, power to Parish Councils to buy or rent land
for small holdings under schemes to be approved by
the Local Government Board, without control of
County or District Councils. Secondly, similar
power to get land for cottages ; and, thirdly, this
meeting records its opinion that, granted the first
two conditions, co-operation and organisation, pur-
chases and sales will put every villager in a position
of freedom from squires, parsons, bad farmers,
narrow-minded grand ladies, and all other evil-dis-
posed persons."

The resolution was carried unanimously. It was
further resolved to send copies to the Squire and
parson, whose engagements had (it was presumed)
compelled them to leave the meeting before its
conclusion.

"LA TERRE QUI MEURT"

BY PHILIP MORRELL, M.P.

AFTER so much that has already appeared it seems
almost impossible to say anything further in favour
of a policy of land reform. It is, after all, the old
Liberal policy. The present Government is pledged
to it. The demand for it arises not merely in the
rural districts, but in every part of the country ;
and in those districts which I know best I do not
believe any single consideration carried more weight
at the election than the Prime Minister's emphatic
words upon this subject. It is a proposal that will
soon have reached that most dangerous stage when
every one speaks well of it.

But if any Liberal is still in doubt as to the
urgency of this problem, let him come and visit
Oxfordshire. There he will see what land monopoly
means. He will see villages decaying and the land
neglected and starved. He will see cottages unfit
for habitation, crowded and yet insufficient ; and
when they have fallen to ruins none built to take
their place. If he makes inquiries he will find that
it is next to impossible for " the small man " to get
a piece of land ; that, except here and there, small
holdings are unknown, and that in many places there

148 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

is a dearth even of allotments ; that the County
Council has a small holdings committee which
seldom or never meets, and that the only recent
application made to them was summarily rejected
on the ground that the applicants, four working
men, could not afford to buy their holdings out-
right.

If he looks at the agricultural returns for the
county he will see that out of 15,000 persons
engaged in agriculture some 12,000 are in the
position of labourers or hired men, and that the
average wages of the labourer in Oxfordshire are
lower than in any other county in England. And
from the census returns he will not be surprised
to learn that whereas between 1891 and 1901 the
population of the urban districts increased by 4,770,
the population of the rural districts in the same ten
years went down by 7,805.

But except among the labourers and their families
he will not see any signs of poverty. On the con-
trary he will find that the land is most of it in
the hands of rich men — many of them newcomers
who have made money in the towns, and who
generally have not either the motive or desire to
try and make a profit from the land they hold ;
that large houses are being built and parks and
gardens laid out ; and that sport was never more
flourishing. In a word, he will be observing the
familiar fact that land in such districts as this is
becoming more and more the pleasure-ground of
the rich and less and less the treasure-house of the
nation.

Let me give from my own experience a few
typical cases.

W is a village of about 900 inhabitants,

"LA TEEKE QUI MEURT" 149

situated upon a railway, in the centre of an agricul-
tural district, about twenty minutes by rail and six
miles by road from a large town, and within easy
access of London. With any fair chance it is a
place that would quickly develop. There are
already one or two small holdings and market-
gardens, which are doing well. But for the most
part there is no outlet of this sort. The houses
are cramped together, many of them without gar-
dens, and as the place is surrounded by large estates,
no further land is available. The only allotments
are upon a north slope, more than a mile away.
In spite of the railway and the proximity of good
markets the population is steadily declining.

C is a small and picturesque village, situated

less than a mile from a station, on a main line,
with rich meadows running down to the Thames.
The cottages are well built and comfortable, but as
the whole parish belongs to a single landlord — a
rich man of independent income, who will not sell
or develop — it is impossible for any one but a
labourer to get a footing in the place. Between
1891 and 1901 the population went down by more
than 25 per cent.

I is another " one-man village," situated per-
haps less favourably than the last, but within four
miles of a growing town. All the land is let to
a single farmer, and every cottage is in his hands
as a " tied cottage." The inhabitants are not
allowed to keep either pigs or poultry for fear
they should rob their employer. They have no
allotments, and hardly any gardens, but are allowed
the use of a bit of field to grow potatoes. The
houses are in a wretched state. The first thought
of every young man is to get away.

150 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

N is a place of about 500 inhabitants, splen-
didly situated round a large common, within five
miles of a market town, and about forty miles
from London. There is a great demand for cot-
tages and small holdings ; but almost the whole
parish is in the hands of two big landlords, neither
of whom will develop his estate in this direction,
and no land therefore is available. At the last
census the population of the parish had been
reduced by more than 20 per cent.

These are, as I have said, typical cases. With
the exception, perhaps, of one of them they give
almost too favourable a view. In hundreds of other
villages of England a similar or worse state of
things could be found. Everywhere the same pro-
cess is going on. Silently and steadily the country
population is being forced into the towns, there to
increase unemployment and distress. If we had
not the example of foreign countries — of Holland
with its small holdings and of Denmark with its
admirable land policy, in both of which countries
the rural population is steadily increasing, and of
those rare spots in our own country where small
holdings have already been tried— we should be
inclined to believe this process inevitable. And yet
no one pretends that the land of this country is
over-cultivated or that it could not support a far
larger population than it does now and produce a
far larger return. Of the £1 6,000,000 of agricul-
tural produce — principally butter, eggs and bacon—
which we import every year from Denmark alone,
how much, under better conditions, might be
produced here?

What, then, is the remedy, or, rather, how is it
to be applied? How are we to secure for the

"LA TERRE QUI MEURT" 151

working occupier the elementary conditions of
success ?

In the first place there must be a comprehensive
policy. A mere tinkering of the Small Holdings
Act or of the existing Housing Acts will be not
only insufficient but useless. Although here and
there a local authority has been found strong enough
to act, in face of all the obstacles which a careful
Legislature has placed in its way, in the majority
of cases, as things are at present, it is impossible
for any real progress to be made. The grip of
the old order is too strong. The odds in favour
of obstruction are too heavy. You may talk of
the advantage of small holdings, and demonstrate
the probable gain both to landlord and tenant,
but as English society is now framed some of the
strongest forces in rural life will always be against
you. To the average landowner, and still more to
his agent, the creation of small holdings means the
growth of an independent spirit, the encouragement
of Radicalism, and the spoiling of sport. No argu-
ment but compulsion will overcome such objections
as these.

In the second place delay is fatal. The question
has been discussed long enough. It is time for the
Government to take action. By waiting they only
strengthen the forces of obstruction. The old
lethargy, which was shaken off for a short time
at the election, will return, and the agricultural
labourer will begin to believe, as there are plenty
of willing voices to persuade him, that the Liberal
Party cannot help him.

Let me now sketch very briefly the sort of policy
that seems to me to be required.

(i) The establishment of a Land Commission or

152 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

of a branch of the Board of Agriculture on the lines
of the proposed Scottish Land Commission, with
power to grant assistance for dividing or adapting
land, building dwelling-houses, &c.

(2) The establishment wherever possible of volun-
tary committees — similar to unemployment com-
mittees or to the Dutch Boards of Health — whose
expenses would be paid, and who would act in
conjunction with local authorities, or, failing them,
with the central Government, in receiving applica-
tions, collecting information, and generally providing
the motive power to make a start ; such committees
to be nominated in part by the central Government
and in part by the County Council.

(3) The establishment of a branch of the Board
of Agriculture to deal with agricultural co-operation
by providing skilled teachers and lecturers, and by
assisting in the formation of societies.

(4) The conferring on County Councils and muni-
cipal bodies of simple and uniform powers for the
compulsory purchase and hiring of land for any
public purpose — e.g., allotments, small holdings,
housing, water, drainage, rights of way — in place
of the diverse complicated and generally unwork-
able powers which they now possess.

(5) The requiring of all local authorities to levy
their rates on the certified capital value of the land,
such value to be afterwards the basis for fixing the
price where it is required to be taken over.

When such measures as these have been carried
through — not piecemeal, but comprehensively and
thoroughly — we shall at least have made some
advance towards the colonisation of England.

VII
SOME LESSONS FROM ABROAD

BY LEVI LEVER, M.P.

IT will surely occur to the man in the street that
of all times in the history of the nation the present
is the most propitious for seriously considering the
best means of colonising England, and solving the
great and intricate question of the unemployed. A
time when the trade of the country is in many dis-
tricts distinctly booming, a time of unrivalled progress,
notwithstanding the prophecies of Mr. Chamberlain
that a few years would see the decline of our great
industries. A time when an enormous increase is
shown by the Board of Trade returns in our imports,
exports, and re-exports for the nine months just
ended.

Added to all this is the fact that we have in power
a strong Government with a gigantic majority such
as has not been enjoyed since the Parliament imme-
diately following the passing of the great Reform
Bill of 1832. A majority to be accounted in a
great measure to the democratic views of the
candidates who pronounced themselves so strongly
in favour and desirous of helping forward drastic
domestic legislation in preference to spending vast
sums of money on useless foreign expeditions.

153

154 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Side by side with this ever-increasing prosperity
we unfortunately have a great mass of unemployed,
who are not to be altogether absorbed, as some
would expect, by an improving trade, owing to the
great increase in the introduction of machinery, and
the somewhat exacting conditions of the labour
market, which are such as to demand the most
skilled and energetic workers, whilst casting aside
the aged and the less efficient.

What is the remedy ?

Land reform ! Land reform ! Land reform !

The initial step to be taken is for all advocates
of land reform to lose no opportunity of expounding
the evils of the existing old feudal system, and of
making it perfectly clear that the electors are
anxiously awaiting from the present Government
a measure of reform which, if it does not altogether
remedy, will at least do something to mitigate the
evils and honestly try to make life more tolerable
in the villages, whilst attempting to create an air
of independence and self-reliance amongst the agri-
cultural labourers, so that they may be retained
on the land, instead of being driven, as now, by
dearth of employment and cottage accommodation,
from the countryside to the already overcrowded
towns and manufacturing centres.

The remedy is, I believe, to be found in :

The Land Tenure Bill,

Small holdings,

A national system of afforestation, and

Legislation to prevent land going out of cultivation.

The Land Tenure Bill is of paramount importance.
It will give the farmer that freedom of cropping and

SOME LESSONS FEOM ABROAD 155

disposing of his produce which is absolutely essential
if farming is to prosper here as in other countries ;
whilst, at the same time, it provides for compensa-
tion for unreasonable disturbance. These provisions
will prove an inestimable boon to the farmer, and,
at the same time, constitute a very powerful factor
in retaining the labourers on the land, as tenant
farmers will feel justified in incurring considerable
expenditure in converting portions of their land
from a more or less unprofitable cultivation to the
production of vegetables, fruit, and the like, involving
a great increase of labour, but invariably proving a
lucrative form of culture.

To illustrate my argument, I will just take one
farm in East Anglia, where the income derived
was so miserably inadequate that the farmer recog-
nised the necessity, if he remained, of embarking
in fruit and vegetable cultivation, notwithstanding
the risk of being turned out at short notice, being
only a yearly tenant. The result has been most
satisfactory, as the number of people finding employ-
ment on the farm to-day is more than double what
it was previously, and the weekly wages paid, albeit
the introduction of machinery, has increased at an
equal rate. The farmer is prepared, the moment he
has security of tenure and compensation for un-
exhausted improvements, to extend this department
of his business, which will, he assures me, afford
employment for a very much larger number of
men, women, and lads. I at once suggested, as
most people would, that he should obtain a long
lease of his farm, and thus feel free to extend his
enterprises, and improve his holding. What was

156 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

the reply? The same as you hear all over the
country : that the landlord refuses to grant a lease
of any kind.

If, after passing the Land Tenure Bill, the Govern-
ment will introduce a real system of small holdings
we shall at once see arrested the present serious
migration from our villages, and a great increase
in the petite culture which has proved in France
such an enormous source of income to the peasant
farmers, and of the very greatest advantage to the
nation as a whole.

Who would be bold enough to contend that the
British peasant, given, as in France or Germany,
his small holding, is not equally able to successfully
undertake egg production, poultry rearing, and pig
breeding ?

I will not debate the advantages to be derived
from small holdings, as they, I think, are admitted
by all social reformers of whatever politics. The
question that should exercise our minds is how
best to establish such a system. The present
method, through the County Councils, has proved
to be absolutely futile.

I agree with Mr. Winfrey that the responsible
authority must be Parliament itself. His suggestion
that a new branch of the Board of Agriculture should
be created for the purpose of accomplishing this great
work will generally commend itself. Petitions of
Parish Councils or of any body of would-be small
holders in a district should at once receive the
attention of this suggested new sub-department,
which must possess compulsory powers to acquire
all such lands as may be required. Opponents
of the system may contend that small holdings
cannot be made to pay. This is a fallacy. We

SOME LESSONS FROM ABROAD 157

have already proof to the contrary in this country.
Let us in a way study and imitate the conditions
obtaining to-day in Germany and France, where
the land is very much subdivided, perhaps in some
cases too much so, which is a point that requires
to be safely guarded against.

In France there are over two and a half million
holdings under twenty-five acres ; in Germany there
are over two and a quarter million holdings under
twenty-five acres ; whereas in the United Kingdom
the land is in the hands of comparatively few, e.g.,
710 persons own about one-quarter of all England
and Wales ; seventy persons own about one-half
of Scotland. What undoubtedly is required to
ensure the success of small holdings, which must
of necessity be accompanied with a sufficient cottage
accommodation, is the founding of small local co-
operative societies for the better collection and dis-
tribution of the produce, and for the better purchasing
of the requirements.

The great obstacle in the way of establishing small
holdings will be the high prices asked for land,
which assumes at all times such an abnormal price
when landowners think it is required. The solution
of this difficulty is perhaps to be found in the
taxation of land values, a subject that must receive
serious consideration if a stop is to be put to the
withholding of the land from the people.

Just one word on the important subject of affores-
tation, which, if taken vigorously in hand with earnest
determination, might do more than any other for

158 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

helping the necessitous unemployed over the ever-
recurring periods of trade depression.

A beginning has been made on a small scale by
one or two local authorities, but this is a matter
that requires to be taken in hand by the Government
itself, inasmuch as the unremunerative period would
be somewhat long and form too great a local burden,
whereas a Government grant, however large, would
not be prejudicial to the nation's finances, and would
in the long run prove a moral, financial, and com-
mercial success.

It has been computed there are thirty million
acres of cultivable land still uncultivated in the
United Kingdom. Surely if this uncultivated land
were taxed the Government could acquire vast
tracts, at a low price, quite suitable for timber
growing, which in Germany has been undertaken
on a large scale, and proved financially successful
when scientifically managed after one hundred years.
In the meantime, what a boon timber-growing estates
would prove to this country, finding work of such a
nature for the unskilled unemployed as to arouse
a new interest in life, and would go a long way
in re-establishing the health, strength, vigour, and
morale of the poor creatures pressed into the already
overcrowded towns by force of adverse circumstances.

VIII

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY

BY CORRIE GRANT, M.P.

(i) THERE can be no question of the Need. Ask
every Progressive member of Parliament what the
rural labourers want ; ask every political agent,
every local preacher, the same question. The
answer is ever the same, " To get land ! "

A personal experience of my own is in point.
Since March, 1895, I nave Deen UP anc* down
the Rugby Division on my bicycle, until I know
every road in it (every short cut especially, because
they are usually, alas for my tyres, long cuts
because of gates and stones!). Last autumn I
obtained in each of my visits an invitation to tea
in some cottage to meet the village workers. We
usually met between four and five, and after our
meal talked until it was time for the meeting at seven
or eight. Whatever we began about those talks
ended in " the land." The need for it, the varied
possible uses for it, the present unproductiveness of
it, the hopelessness of getting it !

After one of these meetings my host said to me,
" I hope you will come again, Mr. Grant. We
are getting to know you a bit now." They had

159

160 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

never asked me before, though I had been to the
cottage several times ; would not have asked me
then but for a broad hint, after ten years' work. In
that one sentence lies one explanation of the problem
of colonising England, never understood or even
thought of by town dwellers. One great difficulty in
dealing with the rural land question lies in the
shyness, the suspicion, the slowness to form an
opinion, or to determine on action along new lines of
the agricultural labourer.

(2) Why is not the need supplied ? There is that
great law of supply and demand, the cure for half
the evils of life fifty years ago. But supply implies
willingness to sell, and to sell what is wanted.
Every week for years past the Warwickshire papers
have advertised land for sale in that county — estates,
large farms, farms, small farms, now and then small
holdings. But bits of an acre, with the right to take
the next lot or lots at the same price, I have never
seen advertised. Nobody does for agricultural land
what companies and speculators are ready to do for
building plots. No one buys a farm, and breaks it
up into small holdings and allotments. The reason
is obvious. The demand at any one spot is not
equal to absorbing the whole of a farm.

In one of my villages a landlord is willing to
sell about 200 acres worth 2os. an acre for £2$
an acre. Several people would like some of it.
One man wants eleven acres, another four, and in
one way or another forty-five acres could be let
at 403. an acre, or even more. The villagers want to
hire, not to buy. If he divided his farm to suit them
the landlord would have to spend the profit rent for
some years to come in the expenses involved in
the change, and he might lose his present tenant into

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 161

the bargain. Like many other people, he is "not
taking any risks."

(3) Who can supply the need ? The landlord can,
of course, and if men were anxious to copy Lord
Carrington's example as a landlord, in every county,
perhaps even in every petty sessional division, we
might have his experience reproduced. But they are
not. Talk to them as I have done to scores. You
get no sympathy, no comprehension of the urgency
of the need. Most of them say that their labourers
don't want land. " They don't ask for it, and they
are not backward in asking as a rule." What an
argument ! They might as well say that labourers
don't want grapes, because they never ask for the
hothouse fruit in their greenhouses.

Some landlords, it must be added, rightly say
this. Where in a village there is regular work, good
wages, pretty cottages, with good gardens, allotments,
and the big house always there to run to in an
emergency the present-day labourer is content.
His son won't be.

An equally large class of landlords don't want
small holdings. They know that these will affect
their game and their hunting, and unless taken in
hand as a definite business, they won't appreciably
increase their income. "They are all worry and
trouble," one man said of his small tenants to me.
It depends on how they are handled, I think.

Then there are the land agents. Every one will
admit that some years ago the country land agents,
both resident and professional, did much to help in
the supply of allotments. Here and there, too, some
of them have taken much trouble to get bits of land
for men whom they thought trustworthy and
deserving. As a class, however, they are too much

162 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

taken up with big affairs and big estates, and have
no time or inclination for these small things.

It comes to this, that the labourers must help
themselves, advised and stirred up and guided by
helpers and well-wishers outside. Individually they
can do nothing. Acting together in a village, and
electing and controlling the Parish Council, they can
do much. It should be, then, our first aim to call
attention, emphatically and persistently in the rural
districts, to the powers already possessed, and
not fully exercised, and in Parliament to the
extensions wanted.

For instance, a Parish Council can call upon
its Rural District Council to provide cottages with
gardens up to half an acre (with an appeal on
refusal to the County Council), and the Rural District
Council can buy land, either by agreement or
compulsorily, for the purpose, and borrow the money
on loan (Housing of the Working Classes Acts,
1890 and 1900). I know of one case in which this
power has been exercised. It is true that it took an
energetic, tactful, leisured woman some six years to
carry through. But this is always so the first time.

It very often pays the village clergyman to sell his
glebe, because the price when re-invested gives him
both a better and a more certain income. He can do
this now under the Glebe Lands Act, 1888, with the
consent of the Land Commissioners. One condition
of consent may be that the land, or some part of it,
is to be offered for sale in small parcels, or to the
Rural District Council for allotments.

There is a power in Section 17 of the Small
Holdings Act, 1882, which seems to have been
overlooked. A County Council may advance to any
tenant (holding any quantity of land between one
and fifty acres), if he can agree on a price with his

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 163

landlord, three-fourths of the purchase money. Any
Parish Council also may call the attention of the
County Council to the need for small holdings, and
so set the machinery of the Act in motion.

Further power, of course, is the one thing that is
essential, and fortunately we can move along the line
of legal precedent, broadening downwards here and
there. Under the Allotments Extension Act of 1882
(45 and 46 Victoria, c. 80) a.11 trustees of charity lands
must set apart a field suitable for allotments, and
must every February give notice on the church doors
of the land so set apart, and of the rent. It is not a
far step to require them to sell to the Parish Council.
Why, indeed, should not all ecclesiastical, educational,
or charity corporations holding land be required to
sell to all local authorities ? It is still a principle of
our common law that corporations cannot hold land,
and where they have over-ridden it they only want it
for its income. Notoriously they are the worst land-
lords in the kingdom.

The procedure almost must be shortened, simpli-
fied, and much lessened in cost. There is no longer
any need for inquiries by headquarters and provisional
orders. Town Councils and County Councils ought
to be able compulsorily to acquire land within their
own area after notice to the landlord by the
authority and inquiry by them unless within a
certain time the Public Department interposes. The
price to be the market value. These two proposals
are not revolutionary, and they are not mine. They
were part of a scheme for taking land compulsorily
for public purposes outlined six years ago by a very
great legal authority.

These are just hints at the lines that ought to be
followed.

IX
WHAT MIGHT BE DONE WITH THE LAND

BY H. F. LUTTRELL, M.P.

IT is time, indeed, that the English land question
should receive attention in Parliament. For while
in many respects, both as to legislation and adminis-
tration, we are in advance of other countries, as
regards our land laws we are immeasurably behind.
It is useless to expect a proper treatment of the land
until we have our laws relating to land suitable to
the present-day requirements of the people. Before
we plant we must remove the old stumps. Those
ancient laws and customs of settlement, entail, and
primogeniture which were passed centuries ago in
the supposed interests of the large owners of land
still remain ; and so rigid are they that a quarter of
Britain is owned by a few hundred persons. We
have thus the spectacle of a few surfeited and masses
hungering.

In the towns these laws have built up that cramp-
ing system of leaseholds, and in the country they
prevent the owners from developing their properties
and improving their farms and building and main-
taining cottages. Under them it is possible for
property to be settled upon an unborn descendant,

164

WHAT MIGHT BE DONE 165

and for such property to be under control and
restrictions imposed by a former owner, the removal
of which is costly ; while under primogeniture, in
case of intestacy, the whole property devolves upon
one son, and he not of necessity the most capable,
but the eldest.

For what are these laws and customs ? To keep
together great properties and prevent, so far as the
State can prevent, their p9ssible distribution. What
do they mean ? That no other individual who lives
on them, however industrious, however thrifty, how-
ever energetic, can ever hope to own one single yard
of land. Surely it is time these laws were changed.
It would be futile to spend time and money on this
subject until we have cleared the way by removing
these obstacles, for there can be no real freedom of
trade, either in town or country, when such unjust
laws hamper freedom and security. Then, having
done this, we should be free to start a system suitable
to present-day conditions. We must first determine
what is to be our destination, and then lay down the
lines.

Is it to be private or public ownership? If public
ownership, should it be a national leasehold system,
as in India, or a decentralised system, with delegated
powers to local representative authorities. While
most land reformers are agreed that an occupying
ownership would be preferable to our present system,
many would be opposed to State assistance for such
a system, and this on account of the difficulty of its
application to future needs, and of the fear of its
growing into one of land monopoly. They would
contend that a system which suited Ireland would
not of necessity suit Britain, Ireland being more
sparsely populated and the holdings smaller, ren-

166 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

dering such a scheme more easy. Besides which
occupiers there were already recognised as part
owners, and it was more the completion of an already
recognised system than the making of a new one.
What in Ireland is largely a peasant proprietorship
would in Britain become a farm ownership, and from
farm ownership to land monopoly would be a smaller
step than from peasant proprietorship.

Whether it be public or private ownership, the
first step must be for the State to resume its rights
over the land. It must be made clear that, where
necessary in the interests of the public, the State has
a perfect right to acquire the land. This principle
has already been admitted in the case of railways.
If it were thought right compulsorily to acquire land
for the construction of railways, surely such com-
pulsion may be made to apply where land was
required to satisfy the needs of the public. Com-
pulsion does not mean confiscation, for where a fair
price is paid it cannot be called confiscation.

The dread of compulsion has crippled our Allot-
ments and Small Holdings Acts, and rendered them
of but little avail. Experience shows that if the
most is to be made of the land there must be given
to the occupiers of the land reasonable security in
their tenure and freedom to farm well.

But more than this is required. There must be
facilities given for small holdings. It must be re-
cognised that to-day land cultivation does not mean
corn-culture supplemented with animal culture, but
that fruit and vegetable and flower culture are making
large contributions to the returns. And there is a
demand for more than the present supply, for in 1904
two million pounds' worth of apples, more than half
a million pounds' worth of pears, and more than half a

WHAT MIGHT BE DONE 167

million pounds' worth of plums were imported, and
of vegetables over a million pounds' worth of onions
and nearly two and a half million pounds' worth of
potatoes—almost the whole of which might have
been grown in this country. For the production of
these, facilities should be given for small holdings.
Would not difficulties be a better term than facilities
for what the State has done so far in the direction of
granting and the extension of small holdings ? It is
a locked-gate system. The field is large, the gates
are many; but they are locked, and locked by the
word " may."

Where there's no will there's a may. And where
there's a may there's no way. In order to place
small holdings within the reach of the people, we
must turn many of our permissive proposals into
compulsory powers. We must let representative
public bodies have the power to take over land — if
necessary, by compulsion — and these bodies should
be given facilities, by State loan or otherwise, to set
up small holdings and dwellings. It is all-important
that these bodies should be really representative of
the people, and to be so they must be bodies with
which the people are in touch. The Parish and
Urban Councils are the most representative of our
Councils, and to them much of the work should be
entrusted.

THE VILLAGE TRAINING

BY FREDERIC VERNEY, M.P.

WHAT do we want, and how are we going to
get it?

We do not want to revolutionise an industry
suddenly by abolishing landlords or farmers for the
benefit of labourers. I will not even here advo-
cate the fashionable expedient of farm colonies as
applicable generally, although they may doubtless
be of great use in exceptional cases. In the words
of a countryman who knows the Midlands well, and
who has lived all his life among farm labourers,
"What we want is a few small holdings in every
village, and the method of obtaining them made
easy."

Could any ambition be more natural or more
wholesome for a farm labourer than the desire to
get hold of a bit of land, on which he may spend
skill, knowledge, and experience, and may get a fair
return from them ? When a tailor wants cloth, or a
shoemaker wants leather, he has not to go and pay
a lawyer for investigation of title a heavy fee, nearly
or quite as big as the price of the raw material. Still
less is there any absolute bar, whether feudal or
otherwise, to prevent his buying cloth or leather.

168

THE VILLAGE TRAINING 169

Make land as easy to buy as cloth or leather, and
one great and unjust hindrance in the way of farm
labourers will have disappeared.

To get the land we must utilise the machinery of
our local self-government. And this for more
reasons than one. It is only local men who know
local requirements, and it is local requirements,
varying greatly in different counties, and even on
different estates and in different parishes, that we
have to meet. Secondly, by not using Local Govern-
ment machinery it becomes rusty and unusable.
Moreover, Local Government means organised self-
help, and every opportunity for the development of
this excellent quality should be eagerly seized. A
Parish Council can easily find out whether in the
Parish there is an effectual demand for land, either
to hire or to purchase.

On being satisfied that there is such a local
demand, which cannot be supplied except by the
exercise of compulsory powers, a Parish Council
should apply to the County Council, who would
make their own independent inquiry and act accord-
ingly, using every endeavour to purchase the land
by agreement, rather than resort to compulsion, but
not being deterred from using compulsion where
necessary. And this process has to be made easy,
speedy, and cheap. The land is only a part of what
must be provided. " Every small holding, to be
quite successful," writes a very experienced estate
agent in Bucks, " must be thoroughly equipped with
up-to-date farm buildings." Here Government loans
must come in at a low rate of interest, their repay-
ment (principal and interest) being spread over a
number of years.

In many parts of the country the putting up of

170 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

buildings will mean the reinstatement of those which
have been destroyed in years gone by, when there
was the mania for consolidation of small into big
holdings. The creation of small holdings should be
carried out so as to inflict the minimum of injury to
those from whom the land is taken. The supply
should follow the demand. It should never exceed
it. A great deal will depend upon the observance
of fairness and the exercise of tact and common
sense, and here again local knowledge both of men
and of places is essential. The rent payable for the
plots of land should be based upon that paid by
farmers of the neighbourhood, always allowing for
the quantity, the position, and quality of the land
taken, and for every consideration which a valuer
would have to bear in mind in fixing a fair rental
or selling price for the plot in question. If any
scheme of land reform is to be permanently success-
ful there must be nothing in it that could reasonably
be described as confiscation. Working men in Eng-
land never have desired, and never will desire, the
" confiscation " of anybody's property. They are too
honest and too proud. The taking of land com-
pulsorily can only be defended on public grounds
for the public benefit. It is for the benefit of the
whole community, and especially for that of every
class dependent on agriculture, that the ownership
of land should have a far wider basis than it now
rests upon in England.

If any scheme of land reform is to be really suc-
cessful, education must take its part in it. Village
boys must be trained up as skilled workmen in the
field as carefully as town lads are now trained as
skilled men in the workshop. The great movement
of the last few years that has been planting poly-

THE VILLAGE TRAINING 171

technics and technical institutes all over London and
in every provincial town has hardly touched country
life. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of public
money have been invested in giving the knowledge
to artisans which they require to become skilled
men on the way to becoming skilled masters, and
it is an excellent investment. There is plenty of
room for skill on the farm, and even more for skill
on the small holding, and the land reformer who
leaves out of account a scheme of education that
shall train up from childhood to manhood, by prac-
tice as well as in the elements of theory, those who
have to get their living on and by the land — that
land reformer begins by an omission which no
amount of subsequent care will ever supply.

Education is one element of success. Co-opera-
tion is another. The transformation from abject
poverty to comparative comfort and prosperity
among the small tenants in Ireland brought about
by the co-operative movement has given everybody
who has watched the process an object-lesson in land
reform which he can never forget, and the adaptation
of the same principle, in very different circumstances
and conditions, on the Continent is at last arousing
country folk in England to do something in the same
direction. One thing is absolutely certain that, with-
out co-operative agencies, foreigners would never
have been able to flood our markets with their farm
produce, and enrich themselves by English money.

To sum up, what we want is —

Firstly. — To provide such an education and train-
ing for boys at country schools, and for lads on the
farms, that will make the best of them into skilled
workmen fit to get out of the land all that it has to
give.

172 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Secondly. — To enable our Local Government
Authorities cheaply and speedily to remove all
obstructions which prevent those who work on the
land from getting allotments or small holdings on
purchase or on hire of such a kind, and in such
places, that they can cultivate them productively.

Thirdly. — To encourage combination and co-opera-
tion, and to show their economical advantages over
unrestrained competition for purposes of production
and of sale.

Under the portrait of one of the most successful
colonisers and administrators that ever went from
England to the United States is the motto " Fatti
Maschi Parole Femine." Every Liberal must wish
that the words of this appeal for land reform may
speedily give birth to action of a masculine and
vigorous kind on the part of our Liberal Government.
It is impossible to exaggerate, and difficult to realise,
the importance of the problem of land reform.

In 1851 about one-ninth of the whole population
of England and Wales (some 32^ millions) were
engaged in agriculture.

In 1901 — fifty years later — less than one-thirteenth
of the population were so employed.

When the fullest allowance has been made for the
legitimate attractions of town life — its higher wages,
its wider interests, its more pungent fun, those of
us who have been " country birds," and love the
freedom, the health, the intimacies with man and
beast, of country life, and those of us who also know
what town life means for poorer men, women, and
children, look upon the rush from the country into
the town, stimulated by artificial means, as an ever-
increasing danger to the healthiest, biggest, and best
of our national industries.

THE VILLAGE TRAINING 173

No better "national service" could be rendered
by the League that has adopted this name than
to apply concentrated energy upon the problem how
to improve the conditions of country life for the poor,
so that those who live and work there may find
scope for their ambition, a prosperous outlook for
their children, and something infinitely better than
I2s. to 1 6s. a week, and a workhouse in which to end
their days.

XI
THE WAY OUT

BY E. N. BENNETT, M.P.

THE land hunger in rural England is not so great in
1907 as it was five-and-twenty years ago. The hopes
of the agricultural labourer — the most neglected class
of our workers in England — have been disappointed ;
the enthusiasm of the village movement in the eighties
has long since cooled in face of pledges unfulfilled
and legislative futilities, and the young men and
women, despairing of better things, flock to the
towns or emigrate to the Colonies.

Nevertheless, it is not too late to check the exodus.
It becomes harder year by year, but there is still
a great opportunity for wise and fearless legislation
the main object of which is rather to keep on the land
the people who still remain faithful to their village
homes than to bring back those who have abandoned
them.

Let no Liberal underrate the opposition which will
meet any courageous scheme of land reform. When
temperance legislation comes before Parliament
we shall doubtless realise the amount of antago-
nism offered by all the forces of monopoly and
privilege in this country. But the opposition to

174

THE WAY OUT 175

temperance legislation will be as nothing compared
with that brought to bear against any scheme of land
reform. We have had a slight foretaste of its quality
in the attitude of Tory landlords towards the Land
Tenure Bill of 1906. If the Government are not
really determined to carry through a strong and
drastic scheme of land reform, if they are going to
frame their Bill with a view to please weak-kneed
Liberal landlords, and then modify its provisions
in order to buy off Tory 'opposition, they had far
better leave the question alone.

The dread menace of Protection roused the agricul-
tural labourer from a long political sleep ; his hopes —
though the stirring enthusiasm of Joseph Arch's days
has ebbed — are fixed once more on the Liberal Party.
After our Oxfordshire victories I was constantly met
with the pathetic cry from the poor labourers and their
wives — the average weekly wages for Oxfordshire are
about 133. 8d. — " It is a hard struggle for us, sir; do
your best for us ! "

Small freeholds, small tenant holdings, or allot-
ments ? That is one question. The other is the pro-
vision of cheap houses. From my own experience of
rural districts I should say that the desire for allot-
ments is frequently satisfied where it exists, and that
this means of adding to the labourer's income is at
best precarious and unsatisfactory. The rent charged
for accommodation land for this purpose near a town
or village is often exorbitant : every one knows of
allotment holders who pay at the rate of £2 to £$
per acre, while the farm land over the edge yields
from IDS. to £i. Few allotments can be adequately
worked unless the holder gives up several days a year
from his ordinary occupation in addition to a shocking
amount of overtime put in after the day's labour is

176 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

finished. The returns, too, are often wretchedly
meagre. Here are the statistics of some allotments
in Bedfordshire, where the soil is fairly good, and
potatoes are considered the most profitable crop —
each of the two being one-eighth of an acre in extent.
No. I (better land). Average crop, 27 bushels of
potatoes at 2s. per bushel, £2 143.

Expenses— £ s. d.

Rent (is. 8d. to 35. 4d.), say ...... 034

Manure, say ............ o 10 o

Seed, say ............... 030

land and potatoes, say ... o 10 o

This leaves a profit of £i 73. 8d. a year— about 6d. a
week ;

No. 2 (inferior land). Average crop, 14 bushels of
potatoes at 2s. per bushel, £i 8s.

Expenses — s. d.

Rent .................. 3 2

Manure (two loads every second year) ... 5 o

Seed .................. 3 o

Digging land and potatoes ......... 5 o

16 2

Here we find the magnificent profit of iis. rod. per
annum, actually less than 3d. a week !

No, the provision of allotments will never be ade-
quate to induce the rising generation of young farm
labourers to remain on the land. A most careful
investigation by Mr. Mann into the economic condi-
tions of village life — carried out on the lines of Mr.
Rowntree's researches in York, and published in
" Sociological Papers " (Macmillan, 1904) — has proved
conclusively that in many villages in the South of

THE WAY OUT 177

England and the Midlands one may expect to find
no less than 41 per cent, of the working agricultural
population living in "primary" poverty, i.e., on in-
comes so low that they cannot possibly furnish them-
selves with the food, clothing, &c., which is necessary
to keep them in sound physical health. It is useless
for landowners and others to say that the labourers
" get enough to keep themselves comfortably." Stern
facts and figures prove quite the contrary. And while
such appalling economic conditions continue can one
expect that any young and vigorous labourer is likely
to prefer a rural life, with pauperism at its close, to
the chances of work in our cities or colonies, because
you provide him with an allotment which he must
cultivate after a hard day's work, and from which
with good luck, he may derive a profit of 6d.-is.
a week?

The choice then, lies between "peasant proprietors ''
of small freehold properties and tenant holders paying
rent to a landlord or some private association or to a
Government Board of Commissioners. At first sight
the idea of the small holder owning and cultivating
his own plot of land is attractive, and wonderful
results are achieved by the peasant proprietors of
such countries as Denmark, Holland, and France.
But all those who, like the writer, have had personal
experience of the conditions under which these small
holdings are frequently cultivated are disposed to
favour the creation of tenant-plots rather than free-
holds. Perpetual subdivisions of the land amongst
sons and daughters, the grip of the mortgage and the
moneylender, the low standard of comfort, and the
unceasing toil — all these are factors in Continental
systems with which we must reckon.

Against these, of course, we may set that strong
13

178 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

sentiment of ownership and the complete freedom
from control ab extra which render the Land Pur-
chase Act so acceptable to the people of Ireland.

We have in Oxfordshire two singularly interesting
examples of land divided up amongst a considerable
number of small freeholders. At Minster Lovell the
colony of freeholders founded by Feargus O'Connor
still exists, and at Carterton, some two miles from
Clanfield Station, a vigorous settlement has sprung
up in quite recent years. It is impossible here to
discuss in any detail the points of failure or success
in these two colonies. Suffice it to say that at
Minster Lovell it has been found practically impos-
sible to support a family on any holding of, say, less
than five acres and a cottage, and in consequence
many of the smaller holders engage in other occupa-
tions supplementary to the work of their little
farms — one is a shoemaker, another a mason, and
so on.

It is, perhaps, too soon to draw definite conclusions
from the Carterton experiments. The soil is poor,
but the occupiers are experienced, industrious, and
highly intelligent. Fine crops of fruit are grown,
including grapes, and, despite some dismal prophecies
to the contrary from those who did not know the
calibre of the Carterton settlers, the butter which is
produced on one or two holdings is of the very best
quality. As far as can be gathered, there is every
prospect that this most interesting settlement will
prove successful, in spite of unduly heavy rating and
a poor soil, and that the little farms will yield, in the
words of one of the most experienced Carterton
residents, " not a fortune, but a healthy and pleasant
life."

If any Land Bill is framed on the basis of tenant

THE WAY OUT 179

holdings, then the question arises, What agency shall
act as intermediary between would-be tenant and
present landowner ? I am absolutely convinced my-
self that any idea of employing, in this connection,
County, District, or Parish Councils is useless.
Machinery of this sort will yield us nothing but
futility and disappointment. The Tories knew what
they were about when they established County
Councils — some of the most retrogade and illiberal
bodies in Great Britain, saturated too often with that
landlord prejudice which hates land reform in general
and " small holdings " in particular. Speaking gene-
rally, the District and Parish Councils are little better
for our purpose. Unprogressive Tory influence is,
alas ! in most cases strong enough to control the
policy of these smaller bodies, as well as those of the
County Councils. If we are to accomplish anything
we must establish a strong and sympathetic Board of
Land Commissioners, furnished with powers of com-
pulsory purchase at reasonable market rates, without
the absurd and unnecessary "compensation for dis-
turbance." Such a body would gradually cover the
whole of rural England, discover for itself whether the
labourers really desire to secure small farms of, say,
five to twenty acres, buy suitable land, and let it to
suitable tenants at a fair and equitable rent.

This is, I am certain, the only satisfactory means of
producing a genuine scheme of land reform.

The housing question is too big a one for treatment
here. But I cannot help thinking that in England
we have strangely neglected the use of wood as a
material for house construction. Landlords tell us
they cannot build decent stone cottages to pay them
2\ per cent., and although this feat seems to have been
accomplished by the landowner of the well-known

180 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Brandsby estate, in Yorkshire, the statement of such
inability to provide cheap stone cottages seems as
a rule well founded. Why not try wood? In the
Lofoden Islands, where all timber is imported and costs
almost as much as it does in England, and wages are
about 2^-3 kroner (2s. 4d.-3s. 6d.) per day, I can
build an excellent five-roomed house for, say, 1,000
kroner (£55 I is.). Such a house is warm and weather-
proof, and with care will last fifty years or more.

At any rate, all existing enactments have merely
played with the question. But now we have a
powerful Liberal Government with a strong Radical
element in it. The Labour Party is altogether with
us in this matter of the land, and our Prime Minister
has strongly encouraged our hopes of reform. We
must fulfil our pledges, we must turn our attention to
the humble, patient people who live in the little
country villages.

XII
THE VALUE OF'SMALL HOLDINGS

BY ERNEST J. SCARES, LL.D., M.P.

I AM quite sure that a multiplication of small
holdings would be the means not of bringing back
to the land those people who have left the land,
but of retaining on the land those men, and, what
is more important, the children of those men, who
are now engaged in agricultural pursuits. People
who are not brought into close touch with the
agricultural labourer do not realise the dreariness
of his present outlook. He may be as thrifty and
careful as you please, but except in those rare cases
in which he is able to get possession of a small farm,
he will never have the opportunity of using his hard-
earned savings to the best of his skill and ability.
Ambition, that useful spur to all human endeavours,
must be banished from his nature, for his chances of
promotion, after he has attained the dignity of 135.
a week, a cottage, and a patch of potato ground,
are practically nil. He may sweep the board at
local ploughing matches, he may be the best hedger
and ditcher in the neighbourhood he may thoroughly
understand the cattle which are committed to his
charge, but only in rare cases has this an effect on

181

182 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

the amount of wages he receives. In default of a
small holding, any agricultural knowledge he may
acquire will always be acquired for the benefit of
another, and he has practically no chance of im-
proving his position in the world. He must be out
of doors at all seasons of the year and in all weathers.
If he is in bad health — and even people who spend
their lives out of doors are by no means free from
human ills — he must either go to work or forego his
wages and decrease the weekly allowance of his wife
and family.

As a consequence, at the age of sixty he is
generally in the clutches of "roomatics," his bowed
and twisted body loses its strength and usefulness.
In many cases a kindly farmer keeps him on to do
such jobs as he is capable of doing, but his wages
begin to decrease, and in a few years' time comes
the inevitable demand either for outdoor relief or
the much-dreaded application for admission to the

workhouse.

• • • • •

This being the average lot in life of the agricul-
tural labourer, and when we remember that the
young unmarried labourer living outside of the
farm does not receive wages of the same economic
value as the married man (for though he receives a
little more in money he does not receive the full
equivalent of the economic rent of the cottage and
perquisites), and when we remember the dulness of
many of our country villages and the ambitious
longings inherent in the breast of every man, can
we wonder that our young men flock to our thickly-
populated towns, knowing full well there is always a
demand for the fresh country strength of agricultural
bone and sinew ?

THE VALUE OF SMALL HOLDINGS 183

Small holdings would not only help to keep the
young agricultural labourer on the land, but would
assist many a farmer to start his sons in life without
crippling himself or depriving himself of the capital
he needs for . his own concerns. They would not
only be beneficial to- the State, but they would be
beneficial to the landlords, as they would rear up a
race of men able and competent for agriculture and
fit to use every acre of land to its best possible
advantage. In support ' of this contention I am
permitted to quote an extract from a letter to me of
a well-known Devonshire land agent, who does not
agree with my political views, but who is as anxious
as I am to get more people on the land. He
says :

" I find from experience that if I have a large
farm to let of some hundreds of pounds a year I have
very few applicants for it ; but if I have a small farm
of less than £100 rent, I have many applicants, and
the smaller the holdings the more the applicants,
and a better chance there is of letting to a good
working tenant."

If we are to obtain a sufficiency of small holdings,
drastic and compulsory powers of purchase will have
to be conferred by the Government upon some
authority either already constituted or to be con-
stituted for the purpose, and no Government scheme
could possibly be complete without such provisions.
At the same time, it must be remembered that just
as Mr. John Burns proposes to deal with the problem
of unemployment by many and divers means, so also
the methods of solution of this agricultural problem
must be varied, alternative, and elastic. Every bond-
fide and thoughtful contribution to the discussion is
well worthy of consideration, and even though its

184 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

lines may be neither heroic nor Socialistic, it may
well be that it will assist us in the way we want to
go. Even a scheme which would be approved by the
House of Lords must not necessarily be rejected on
that account, and if good landlords may incidentally
be benefited by our policy I do not consider that this
should be used as a hostile argument. For these
reasons I venture to put before your readers a
suggestion which has been made to me by the land
agent whom I have mentioned above, and I do not
think I could do better than conclude my article by
quoting his own words : —

" I have for a long time advocated an increase of
small holdings between twenty-five and fifty acres,
and I am sure the number might be increased very
considerably to the great advantage of the State, and
of the rural labourer, and with some advantage to the
landowner.

I would suggest that the State should advance to
landowners such sums as might be necessary to
enable them to provide the necessary houses and
buildings, or one or the other, together with a sum
for the subdivision of the field, on the same terms as
to interest and repayment as that granted to the
Irish tenantry, viz., about 3| per cent, for a term of
about sixty-eight years.

" I am sure, from personal knowledge, that in North
Devon many small holdings would be provided if the
landowners had only the opportunity of getting the
money at a reasonable rate of interest. The State
could, if it wished, make it a condition that in the event
of the owner borrowing money for that purpose, the
holding should, for as long as the money remains un-
paid, be farmed as a small holding, and in the event of
the landowners wishing to add to it a larger holding

THE VALUE OF SMALL HOLDINGS 185

he could only do so by paying off the loan, and thus
relieving himself of that restriction.

" The State would be secure as regards the advances,
as the charge would be a first charge, similar to that
now given to the land loans companies, and the work
should be carried out to the satisfaction and with the
approval of the Board of Agriculture. The difference
in value of the land without the buildings and the
value of the holding with the buildings would be the
security for the outlay. An owner would have to
expend £400 to £600 on a small house and build-
ings ; and if the land consisted of, say, twenty-five
to fifty acres, which would be, roughly speaking,
worth £20 an acre, the value of a twenty-five acre
holding would be worth about £900, the State only
having expended £400, and the rent to pay the
interest and rent of the land should be about £40 per
annum, the landlord paying the tithe rent charge and
doing the landlord's repairs. If this scheme be
adopted, the Imperial Exchequer would stand to
lose absolutely nothing. The amount to be charged
for interest and sinking fund would be amply
sufficient to recoup the State, not only for the cost
of the loan, but also for all working expenses, and,
in my opinion, therefore, a large number of small
holdings could be created in North Devon by a
simple Act of Parliament, without any expense to
the taxpayer or ratepayer."

XIII
THE RURAL EXODUS

BY H. R. MANSFIELD, M.P.

I AM glad that the day of spurious Imperialism is
past. I trust the day of genuine Imperialism is
dawning. The future of our country depends not
upon the extension of her borders beyond the seas,
but upon the maintenance of a vigorous manhood
and womanhood at home.

Everybody agrees that the people ought to be
kept on the land, but nobody seems anxious to pay
the piper. Mr. Kipling made it quite popular to
" pay, pay, pay " when it was a matter of destroying
life, but that sort of patriotism is not stirred by any
thought of preserving it. Lamentations by people
in high places at the depopulation of the villages have
generally ended in vain regrets that the labourer
fails to appreciate the peculiar beauty of the simple
life. He is blamed for turning his back on the dim
country lanes for the gas-light glare of thronged
cities. He is censured for choosing to leave the
rustic beauty of his insanitary cottage in the village
for the monotony of a jerry-built house in an endless
street. It is wondered that he is willing to give up
his long hours, low wages, and fresh air for the sake

186

THE RURAL EXODUS 187

of toiling for shorter hours and more money in a
noisy and noisome factory.

If we are to arrive at the cause and eventually the
cure for depopulation we must examine the circum-
stances of the case from a more sympathetic point of
view.

What are the facts of the case as they present
themselves to a young labourer when he is old
enough to begin to look around him, and, as he
would say, " reckon things up a bit " ?

His father is a labourer getting far on the wrong
side of fifty, whose strength is not what it was.
Although he has toiled hard and long, year in and
year out, from youth to manhood, from manhood to
the beginning of dreaded old age, he is no richer in
this world's goods than he was the day he began.
Fortunate is he if he is not in debt at the shop and to
the doctor as well. How could it be otherwise ? A
wife and family with ten or fifteen shillings a week
gave him no chance to put by for the days when he
can work no longer. He has laboured, but other
men have entered into the fruits of his labour. He
hopes to keep his present place for some years yet,
but who knows when sickness or accident may not
end it all ? And if he leaves his present master it will
be more difficult each year to find another. Farmers
will tell him they " have no use for men who haven't
got a bit of steel in them." The end, whenever it
comes, is invariably the same : " George, work is a
bit slack and things aren't very good ; so I am
afraid I shan't be wanting you after next week."
Then for a few weeks a weary attempt to find work,
to hold on to home and freedom. The shopkeeper
begins to shake his head. Nobody will trust him.
Nobody wants him. But the landlord wants his

188 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

cottage, and then — the workhouse. But perhaps he
lives where the landlord or farmer does not turn out
the old workman whom he no longer needs ; so by
taking a lodger, keeping a pig, getting an odd job now
and then, and with what the parish allows him, he is
able to end his days by the old fireside. How often
even this scanty reward for all his labour is tinged
with sadness, perhaps bitterness ! For the son who
is now doing the work the father once did is taxed,
willingly or unwillingly, by the guardians with the
maintenance of the father. And to the son, with his
ever-growing family, the shilling or eighteenpence
out of the weekly wage means deprivation of some
little luxury in the home that would help to make
life sweeter, or some necessity the lack of which
makes life more weary. The son and his wife have
to look carefully at each sixpence before it is spent.
There are so many little things wanted, especially
when the children are coming. It is always at this
time that society taxes the poverty of the young
man for the infirmities of the old.

What chance or hope has the young man to do
better than his father ? You may talk of honesty, of
industry, of thrift, but in what was his father found
amiss ? It is not lack of virtues which brings the
young labourer's father to pauperism in old age.
One wonders sometimes if it is not because of them !
Men of rougher mould, less unselfish, less truthful,
less faithful, less patient, might have done as well.
Men who could grab and grasp might have done
better ! It seems difficult to believe that (as the
world reckons) they could have done worse for them-
selves and their children.

The young labourer sees only one course before
him if he remains in the village — to follow in his

THE RURAL EXODUS 189

father's footsteps. To give all his strength and
knowledge to the soil that it may produce wealth for
other men's enjoyment. He can never become richer
than his ten or fifteen shillings a week. Ill-health,
misfortune, or ailing wife — and he can easily, surely,
become poorer. In good fortune or ill, in strength
or weakness, the end is all the same.

Even if the young man despises the town and clings
to the fields, it is by no means certain that he will be
allowed to remain. When men add field to field and
farm to farm — even though they do not produce one
half the wealth of which their lands are capable —
less and less labour is required. Even if the young
man gets a place he may have to wait long before he
has what he may call a home. Who builds cottages
for labourers in these days? His only chance is to
wait until death or some other reason causes some
other worker to leave the parish, and then the young
man may be able to step into his comrade's antiquated,
tumble-down cottage, ill-ventilated and worse drained.
Two rooms up and two rooms down, where it is
difficult to fight against disease, and more so to
observe the decencies of life. But the District Council
may seize the opportunity to declare the place unfit
for habitation. While the Council is slow to act in
this way, it never by any chance uses its powers to
make provision for those who need housing room.
So men have sometimes to walk miles — to the next
parish, sometimes to the nearest town — in order to
find house room. The young people must put off
the happy day because there is no home to which
the blushing bride can be taken. True, we have laws
to provide housing, but so drawn as to make it
difficult for the most energetic authority to provide
cottages within the limits of the labourer's means.

190 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

True, too, we have laws to provide land for the people,
but so drawn that it is simplicity itself for the
Councils to make them of none effect.

So the young man turns his eyes away from the
country towards the cities of the plain.

He sees there more than one employer to choose
from. He sees more than one opening for industry.
A hundred houses "with all the latest improvements "
can be had for asking. Unknown luxuries in the
way of food, clothing, and entertainment can be had
for payment. He can not only choose his employer,
but need not, unless he desires, make obeisance to
any man. Men who came from the country, who
were young and strong as he is, have gone before
and have succeeded. If he goes he at least may hope
to some day own his own cottage, to succeed in
trade ; possibly to employ labour, to enter public
life, to gain honour and distinction !

Once in a hundred times his dream is realised.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the village loses
a man who would have added to the wealth and
strength of the nation. Too often the town only
gains an unskilled labourer who in times of industrial
stress and storm directly or indirectly swells the ranks
of the unemployed, and sometimes the unemployable.

How are we going to stop this misuse of our best
life, to cure this wasting disease of civilisation ? We
must set about the work of preserving the life of the
rural districts with something of the same deter-
mination with which we set about, say, the
destruction of the Transvaal. We must build our
Dreadnoughts for the creation and preservation of
life, as well as Dreadnoughts for its destruction. I
would ask that with as little delay as possible we
should push forward legislation to

THE RURAL EXODUS 191

1. Provide land for every villager capable of cul-
tivating it.

2. Provide cottages for every villager who requires
one (at two shillings per week).

3. Reform and cheapen the methods of railway
and other communication.

4. Establish depots in every county for the pro-
vision, at lowest price, of all that is wanted in culti-
vating a farm.

I have no doubt these reforms may be described
as Revolutionary and Socialistic. Without using
capital letters, I prefer to describe them as imperialistic
and conservative. I am not troubled about labels,
but I think mine are the more correct. There is no
need for any wild upheaval, of any drastic laws which
would deprive present holders of their rights and
possession, or which would transfer the control of
land in a wholesale manner. All I ask is that the
dangerous conditions arising from landless and
homeless people should be treated in the same man-
ner as would be adopted in the case of an insanitary
or waterless area. Take my suggestions as to land
and housing. I want the Board of Agriculture and
Local Government Board to have powers to ensure
the provision of small holdings and labourers' cottages
wherever there can be shown to be a demand for
them. It is almost useless in these matters to give
additional powers to the County Councils. Those
Councils invariably lack both the detailed knowledge
of the people's wants and the desire to concede
them.

The only authority which knows the requirements
of a village and its people is the Parish Council. The
Parish Councils should be provided with the necessary
means of making its wants known to the two great

192 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

departments I have named. These could easily be
framed so as to show the exact conditions of life in
every village in the kingdom. Each parish should
make a return giving the population, the number of
habitable houses, and the number of rooms per house,
the amount of land let in allotments or small holdings,
the number of men holding and the number still
requiring land, the amount of land required, &c.
When these returns had been received, and wherever
a good case was made out for intervention from
Whitehall, a local inquiry should be held. If, as a
result of the inquiry, the Board was fully convinced
that either land or houses were required, then an
order should be issued to the County Council to
make the necessary provision. There are, of course,
a hundred and one vitally important details to be
considered : the period for which money could be
borrowed, the system of repayment, the provision of
compulsory powers, the arrangement as to manage-
ment, payment of rent, &c.

All I ask now is that we should consider this
matter in the same light as that of drainage or water
supply, believing that it is of equal importance to
the health and wealth of the nation.

Methods of communication, and more particularly
the control and organisation of railways, must receive
attention before long. At present our railways,
willingly or unwillingly, give a preference to foreign
produce, which is injurious both to agriculture and
the general public. It is both difficult and costly
for even the big farmer to get his produce to town.
It would be impossible for a multitude of small
holders to succeed unless there was a much better
and cheaper method of placing their produce on the
market.

THE RURAL EXODUS

193

The fourth item in my programme may provoke
the most criticism, but it is already established in
many parts of Ireland, and has achieved a remark-
able success. What the Congested Districts Board
has done for Ireland the Board of Agriculture could
do for England. The Irish small holder is able to
get his seed, his manures, his implements, his pedigree
stock, his building materials, from the Board. Advice,
practical assistance, and encouragement are given
him at every turn.

If our Government will but do one half for the
peasantry of England of that which successive
Governments have already done for the peasantry
of Ireland, I have no doubt that the wilderness
and solitary places of our rura- districts will in time
rejoice and blossom like the rose.

PART IV

THE OFFICIAL TESTIMONY

SUMMARISED BY

C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.P.

SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES

IMPORTANT Government publications were issued
last year bearing directly upon this question. The
most noteworthy of these are (a) the Report on the
Decline in the Agricultural Population of Great
Britain, issued by the Board of Agriculture ; (|3) the
Report of the Departmental Committee on Small
Holdings in Great Britain; (7) the Report of the
Select Committee upon Rural Housing.

I. THE DECLINE IN AGRICULTURE.

The Board of Agriculture here summarises replies
sent in to certain specific questions addressed to its
correspondents in every county in England, Scotland,
and Wales. These questions include queries as to
the continuance of the agricultural decline ; the
causes of that decline ; the influence upon the decline
of alterations in the system of farming, especially the
encouragement of fruit farming, poultry rearing, and
market gardening ; and the nature of the demand
for allotments and small holdings.

Testimony varies greatly from county to county,
and even within the borders of the same county.
But the general conclusions reveal (a) a general
opinion that the agricultural decline has continued
in the five years since the census ; (/3) that the causes

197

198 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

of the decline include the extension of machinery in
agriculture, the increasing desire of the labourers to
leave the land, and deficiency of adequate or satis-
factory housing accommodation ("reported from
about thirty counties "), and the lack of incentive to
remain on the land, and of any reasonable prospect
of advancement in life. This last is largely bound
up with the difficulty of acquiring small holdings and
the locking up of the land on the big farms.

The testimony, though striking in its emphasis
upon the over-supply of allotments, is equally striking
in the wide consensus of opinion as to the inadequacy
of the supply of small holdings. The labourer, in
fact, has no more use for a long piece of land to
labour upon in the evenings after a hard day's toil.
What he exceedingly desires is the opportunity of
advancement and a career given by the ladder to-
wards independence and a more or less complete
subsidy from the land.

Here are a few random extracts from the corre-
spondents of the Board of Agriculture.

Huntingdon. — " In the Fenlands there is a great
demand which is hardly met."

Hertford. — "There is a great scarcity of small
holdings, and it is almost impossible to get allot-
ments on favourable terms."

Middlesex. — "There is a difficulty in obtaining
small holdings. Small pieces of about 20 acres
let readily at high rentals ; much land within ten or
fifteen miles west of here, now devoted to corn, if
cut up into small holdings, with suitable house and
premises, would let readily at enhanced rents."

Lincoln. — " At present," says one correspondent,
"owing to the great demand, small holdings com-
mand a higher rent than they are really worth,

SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 199

generally 50 to 75 per cent, higher than similar
land let to larger tenants." " There is a difficulty,"
says another, " in obtaining land for small holdings,
for which there is a keen demand."

Yorky E. Riding. — " A difficulty is experienced in
obtaining suitable land for allotments and small
holdings."

Kent. — " The importance of small holdings and
their usefulness in keeping villagers on the land are
not sufficiently realised in' Kent. Where there are
small holders they do well, especially those who have
a little fruit land."

Surrey. — " Small holdings at fair rents are badly
wanted, but are difficult to get. Had they been
obtainable it is thought the decline in population
would not have been so great.

Sussex. — " There is a great demand for small
grass holdings from ten to forty acres," says one.
"There is very great difficulty in obtaining small
holdings," asserts another, "for which there is a
keen demand."

Hampshire. — " The supply is not equal to the
demand, as there is always competition for a good
holding."

Nottingham. — "There is a keen competition for
small holdings of ten to forty acres, and these
command very often a higher rent than is justified
by the profit to be got out of them."

Leicester. — "Small holdings are stated to be very
difficult to obtain in many villages, and the rents are
proportionately very much higher than those of
larger farms."

Northampton. — " There is a difficulty in procuring
small holdings, for which there is an increasing
demand."

200 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

Salop. — " There is a good demand for convenient
small holdings with houses and buildings thereon,"
says one, " and a number of these would let readily
to suitable tenants." " Holdings of three or four
acres of grass land," says another, " are not sufficiently
plentiful, and had such been offered to thrifty
labourers the prospect would have counterbalanced
the desire for change."

Worcester. — " No doubt more small holdings would
be taken up if they were available." But one of the
difficulties is " the unwillingness of the large farmers
to part with any of their land, so that even if a land-
lord is willing to incur the expense, a small holding
can practically only be carried out on a change of
tenancy."

Somerset. — "Small holdings let readily and at
higher rents than large farms."

Dorset. — " While in some districts there is little
demand for small holdings in others they are keenly
competed for."

Devon. — " Small holdings are in good demand : as
a rule the tenants do well"

Cornwall. — " There are many thousand of acres of
unenclosed land, much of which might be turned to
very useful account, and many labourers if they could
have financial assistance on the security of their
holdings would be inclined to try what they would
do with it.

Hereford. — " Forty years ago there was quite a
number of 5- to 5o-acre farms in this district, and
many of the cottages had from a half to two acres
of orcharding attached. An industrious man with a
family was able to keep a few sheep or a cow or two,
and grow fruit, &c. ; from this small beginning many
of the best and most practical farmers in our district

SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 201

have sprung. In West Herefordshire we have many
large estates of 7,000 to 10,000 acres ; the owners,
being large game-preservers, preferred to have large
farms rather than small holdings. Where these
existed they have been bought up by the large
owners, and the demand for them growing, they
have often let for more than double the rent of
adjoining farms."

>' f
II. THE SMALL HOLDINGS COMMITTEE.

A Departmental Committee on Small Holdings
was appointed by Mr. Ailwyn Fellowes in April,
1905. It originally consisted of the Earl of Onslow
(Chairman), Earl Carrington, Mr. Jesse Collings, Sir
Ralph Anstruther, Major Craigie, Messrs. C. Bidwell,
William Brown, James Long, J. Willis Burd, R. A.
Yerburgh, M.P., and Sir Francis Channing, M.P.

Lord Carrington resigned on his appointment as
Minister of Agriculture in December, 1905, and
appointed Mr. Munro Ferguson, M.P., in his place.

The Committee reported in December, 1906. They
notice the comparative failure of the Act of 1892.
They declare that " any further development in the
direction of the division of the land into small
holdings must be undertaken by a Central rather
than a Local Authority, and that experiments so
conducted should fall on the taxes rather than on
the rates ; and, further, that it is essential to any
scheme for the establishment of small holdings
undertaken either by individuals, associations, or
public authorities, that the money required for the
equipment of the holding should be advanced at the
lowest rate that the State credit will allow."

Of the Agricultural Land of England — excluding

202 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

woodland and mountain and heath land — they find
that small holdings of from one acre up to fifty,
although two-thirds of the entire number covered
only 15 per cent, of the cultivated area, 58 per cent,
are in farms of 50 to 300 acres, and 27 per cent, in
farms of over 300 acres.

They note (and in part explain) the failure of the
Small Holdings Act of 1892, and make a number
of minor recommendations designed to improve the
machinery of its working.

They note the instances of success in the recent
establishment of small holdings, some of which
experiments have been described in earlier pages
of this book.

They endorse the reality of the demand, even
outside those districts where at present small
holdings are plentiful. " A strong presumption is
raised by the evidence that in many other districts,
and in other branches of agricultural work, small
farming may be usefully encouraged, and may be
placed on a sound, economic, and profitable footing,
if methods are adopted of starting the men most
likely to work the land well, and of organising and
systematising on economic and more business lines
details of production and collection and distribution
of produce."

They urge that practical steps should be taken by
the Government to promote all forms of agricultural
co-operation, and especially to encourage the forma-
tion of Agricultural Credit Societies with an annual
grant from the Board of Agriculture to the Agri-
cultural Organisation Society, and the use of the
Post Office Savings Bank's deposits for village Co-
operative Credit Societies on the approved security of a
Central Co-operative Agricultural Credit Association.

SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 203

Their principal recommendations include : —

(1) The formation of special branches of the Board
of Agriculture and Fisheries to make definite experi-
ments in the creation of small holdings ; an annual
grant from Parliament for such work ; compulsory
powers to be given to the Board for acquiring land ;
an annual return to Parliament showing the progress
made in the provision of small holdings by the local
authority ; the Board to be allowed to equip the
holdings with suitable buildings, and to let or sell
it at discretion.

(2) The amendment of the Small Holdings Act
1892 ; reducing the purchasers' initial payment from
one-fifth to one-eighth ; giving the County Council
more elastic powers of recoupment and conditions of
tenure.

(3) The granting of State loans to landowners at
the lowest rate of interest possible without loss, to
enable them to equip and adapt voluntarily provided
small holdings throughout the country.

(4) Further facilities for agricultural instruction in
rural districts ; the systematic training of would-be
small holders ; the promotion by the State of credit
banks and the work of agricultural co-operation.

Supplementary reports are in addition presented
by Mr. Munro Ferguson, Mr. James Long, and Sir
Francis Channing ; and a separate report by Mr.
Jesse Collings, who does not sign the general
report.

Mr. Munro Ferguson emphasises the necessity for
more definite action on some of the lines laid down
by the Committee, and suggests some financial modi-
fications. He would desire rather to encourage
special "intensive" cultivation than small farms
engaged in normal farming. He declares that the

204 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

new authorities set up by the Board of Agriculture
" should buy land as proposed, but at rates fixed by
official valuators, with allowance for severance and
other damage, but with no compensation for com-
pulsory sale." He urges the acquirement by urban
communities of the adjacent land. He objects to the
advancement of public loans to private owners, and
pleads that " any fresh grants of public money, for
which so far as land development is concerned sylvi-
culture has just claim, should be devoted mainly to
expropriation where private ownership hampers
public policy."

Mr. James Long deprecates omissions "which
appear to me to be vital in relation to the extension
of the Small Holding system by the aid of Govern-
ment influence and propaganda and public money."

Sir Francis Channing emphasises the serious facts
of rural depopulation — more serious than the Census
returns indicate. "In this country the soil has a
productive capacity per acre greater than in France
or Germany, and vastly greater than in Denmark.
The markets into which foreign products come in
ever-increasing quantity are at our own doors. The
methods which have enabled the foreign and colonial
agriculturist to get and keep control of the wholesale
trade here are precisely the methods which have been
applied in the United Kingdom to other branches of
co-operative work more effectively than in any other
part of the world. Success in small farming here
ought, therefore, to be not more, but less difficult to
attain."

He is convinced that the material is there, in town
and village, which, given a fair chance, would culti-
vate the land in small holdings with efficiency and
success. He is very urgent in demanding the work

SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 205

of the State in stimulating, encouraging, and popu-
larising co-operative action and methods, and in
facilitating agricultural education. In the provision
of land he regards State action and State powers as
imperatively necessary. " Many farmers are distrust-
ful, agents obstructive, landowners ill-informed and
timid. It is an age of extreme luxury, when estates
are bought by the enormously rich for social prestige,
and without thought of the duty that attaches to the
owner of land as the nation's trustee. With many
the passion for sport overrides everything, and will
throw every obstacle in the way of subdivision which
endangers the interests of shooting or of hunting.
Again, large numbers of landowners are bound hand
and foot, and precluded from aiding in the creation
of small holdings."

He deplores a grave defect in the report, in the
absence of recommendations to extend the powers of
local authorities for the acquisition of land. Com-
pulsory powers to the County Councils to hire as
well as purchase land deserve the attention of
Parliament.

He demands caution in the works of the Central
Authority, especially if that authority is to be
encouraged to purchase large blocks of land with a
view to Small Holdings experiments. •

He commends the methods outlined in the Small
Landowners (Scotland) Bill introduced into Parlia-
ment by the Secretary for Scotland in 1906.

He asks for a distinct Small Holdings Commission
or Land Commission for England also.

Mr. Jesse Callings in his independent report
utterly repudiates the giving of State loans to
private landowners for the equipment of Small
Holdings. He pleads strongly for occupying owner-

206 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

ship and for State action on a large scale. " I hold
that the policy of Small Holdings has long since
passed the experimental stage, and if we are to wait
the results of certain ' definite experiments/ it will
be a long time before the ' land hunger ' which exists
can be satisfied."

III. RURAL HOUSING.

On April 27, 1906, the Housing of the Working
Classes Acts Amendment Bill was read a second
time, and committed to a Select Committee.

The Committee was constituted of Sir John
Dickson-Poynder (Chairman), Major Dunne, Messrs.
Mackarness, Morrell, Rowlands, Vivian, T. R.
Bethell, Lane-Fox, Abel Smith, Ginnell, and Col.
Lockwood.

That Committee, after hearing voluminous evi-
dence, reported in December, 1906.

In reviewing existing conditions they note the
widespread scarcity of satisfactory rural cottage
accommodation, as revealed by present evidence and
every previous investigation. " The want of proper
housing in rural districts finds its counterpart in the
congestion of the towns ; and the evils arising out of
overcrowding will never be successfully grappled
with until it is fully realised that the root of the
problem lies in the diminution or stagnation of
population that has for years past characterised rural
districts."

Cottages without adjacent land cannot be built in
agricultural districts to secure a return to cover inte-
rest and sinking fund in addition to the other usual
outgoings if let at the prevailing rents paid by farm
labourers. But the Committee announces abundant

SOME OFFICIAL INQUIRIES 207

evidence to show that the difficulty of rent would be
largely diminished by the addition of land to the
cottage.

The outcry against " by-laws " as a means of pre-
venting cottage buildings is brushed aside. "The
cottage question has been found quite as acute where
no building by-laws exist at all."

They note the " insanitary and indeed deplorable
condition of much of the existing cottage property,"
owing to the perfunctory administration of the
present Sanitary and Housing Law.

Local fear of increased rates, difficulty of obtaining
land for the erection of cottages at a reasonable
price, and the great expense attending the exercise of
compulsory powers under the existing law are certi-
fied as reasons for the failure of the Councils to put
into operation Part III. of the Housing Act of 1890.

In offering recommendations the Committee "have
to record their conviction that the evil is of a wide-
spread and fundamental character, and that if any
real improvement is to be effected, it can only be by
drastic change in the character and administration of
the law." The recommendations are far-reaching
and important. They include : —

The transferring of the Administration of the
Public Health and Housing of the Working Classes
Act from the Rural District Councils to the County
Councils, retaining to the Rural District Councils
concurrent powers to build under Part III. of the
Act of 1890.

The statutory duty of County Councils to
appoint a Medical Officer or Medical Officers of
Health and a sufficient number of sanitary inspectors
for the purpose of carrying the statutes into execu-
tion. Officers to devote the whole of their time to

208 TO COLONISE ENGLAND

the duties of their office, to hold these appointments
during good behaviour and to be removable only
with the consent of the Local Government Board.

Local Government Board to appoint a special
Housing and Public Health Department with a staff
of travelling sanitary and housing inspectors to super-
vise the administration of the Public Health and
Housing Laws by the County Councils and their
executive officers.

Simplification of the law for acquiring land com-
pulsory. "No reform in connection with rural housing
can be of any effective use unless further facilities for the
acquisition of land are given." No solution will be
satisfactory that does not enable a local authority to
purchase land compulsorily for any public purpose
upon the basis of its rateable value. Compulsory
power should be given to the County Councils to
acquire land for small holdings — subject to appeal
against arbitrary treatment from the landlord to the
Board of Agriculture.

The Treasury to lend money for the erection of
cottages at the lowest possible rate at which they
themselves can borrow, the period of redemption of
loan to be lengthened, and grants from the Exchequer
for necessitous rural areas to be administered by
and allocated to County Councils at the discretion of
the Local Government Board.

APPENDIX

AGRICULTURAL POPULATION, 1851

Agricultural labourers 1,077,627

Farm servants ." 364,194

Gardeners 80,946

Farm bailiffs 12,805

Farmers 303,720

Graziers 3,047

AGRICULTURAL POPULATION, 1901

Of the several classes of the agricultural population
specially referred to in these reports the numbers
returned in Great Britain were, in the last three
census years,1 as follows : —

Class.

1881.

1891.

1901.

Increase (+) or
Decrease (— ).

1881-91.

1891-1901.

Farmers and Graziers ...

No.
279,126

No.
277,943

No.
277,694

No.
-1,183

No.
-249

Farm Bailiffs — Foremen

22,895

21,453

27,317

-1,442

+ 5,864

Shepherds

33,125

31,686

35,022

-1,439

+3,336

Agricultural Labourers —
Farm Servants

983,919

866,543

689,292

-H7,376

-177,251

1 Certain changes in the classification adopted at different
censuses must be borne in mind in comparing the returns.

15 209

210

TO COLONISE ENGLAND

EXTENT OF LAND ACQUIRED BY COUNTY COUNCILS FOR
SMALL HOLDINGS UNDER THE SMALL HOLDINGS ACT
FROM ITS COMMENCEMENT (OCTOBER, 1892) TO DECEM-
BER 31, 1902 : —

Acres.

Great Britain ............ 652

Number of County Councils acquiring this land

Roods.

Perches.

NUMBER OF AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS IN EACH OF THE
UNDERMENTIONED CLASSES IN GREAT BRITAIN, WITH
THE AVERAGE SIZE OF HOLDINGS (JUNE 4, 1906).

Countries.

bove i and
t Exceeding
5 Acres.

bove 5 and
t Exceeding
50 Acres.

bove 50 and
t Exceeding
joo Acres.

Above
300.

Total.

si 9

•t'o

Total for Great

No.

Britain

109,749

232,375

150,881

17,828

510,833

63-2

England

80,917

166,017

109,736

14,711

37L38I

66-2

Wales

10,279

3L7I3

18,022

411

60,425

46-2

Scotland ...

18,553

34.645

23,123

2,706

79,027

677

Thus the class described as " Farm Bailiffs" in 1881 and 1891
was described as " Farm Bailiffs — Foremen " in 1901 ; and the
class "Agricultural Labourers — Farm Servants — Cottagers"
in 1 88 1 was described as "Agricultural Labourers — Farm
Servants" in 1891 and 1901, while in the latter year the class
was divided so as to distinguish men in charge of horses and
cattle respectively.

APPENDIX

211

PERCENTAGE OF EACH CLASS OF AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS
TO TOTAL NUMBER IN 1906 AND 1895 IN GREAT BRITAIN.

Counties.

Above i and

not Exceeding

5 Acres.

1906.

1895.

Above $ and

not Exceeding

50 Acres.

1906.

1895.

Above 50 and

not Exceeding

300 Acres.

1906.

1895.

Above
300 Acres.

1906.

1895-

Great Britain

21-48

45-28

%
2Q-54

28-43

England

Wales

Scotland

21-79
17-01

23-48

22-90

25-30

44-70
52-48
43-84

44-87
Si'37
42-59

29-83
29-26

28-13
30-04
28-63

0-68

4-10
074

348

SOME OF GREAT BRITAIN'S IMPORTS OF FOOD FROM ABROAD
IN 1906.

£>

Wheat and wheat flour 41,324,776

Maize 11,034,748

Oats 4*713,265

Animals for food 9,944,859

Bacon and hams 15,893,227

Beef 10,925,309

Mutton 7,413,602

Pork 1,414,976

Poultry, rabbits, &c 3,841,785

Butter and cheese 27,946,533

Eggs ... 6,812,436

Vegetables ... ... 3>379»988

Total ... £144,665,704

ttbe $re»bam

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,
VTOKING AND LONDON

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