ing, or sheep-farmer, still capable of making himself & prosperous man. Yet, when every possible high-light is added, the picture is sombre enough, for nothing can brighten its two main features. First, the land of Britain has since 1878 been going out of cultivation; secondly, the population which that cultivation employed has dispersed and disappeared.

Despite improvement in methods, increase in knowledge and skill, the shadow creeps on. The acreage under the plough steadily declines. The 17.8 million of acres of arable land existing in 1878, which declined to 17.1 in 1884, 16.1 in 1894, 15.2 in 1904, 14-29 in 1914, after rising, as the result of the war effort to 15.8 millions in 1918, have, in 1924, fallen to 14.20 million acres, the lowest figure of arable yet recorded-involving a total loss of 3,600,000 acres of cultivated land in a generation and a half.

Of this immense change it is often said that the British agriculturalist has learnt to adjust himself to new conditions, and has found in the raising and fattening of stock-in grass farming-a new source of profit. This optimistic view seemed for many years to be justified by the annual statistics. But in the last ten years there has occurred side by side with the decrease of some 90,000 acres of arable land, a reduction from 17.5 million acres to 16.3 million in the land classified as 'permanent grass.' This, as far as the figures show, is particularly a post-war phenomenon, and as such it was treated in the Agricultural Returns for 1921.

"The disquieting feature of the return,' it was there said, 'however, is that the loss of this land which is being withdrawn from arable cultivation is not being made good by an increase in the area under permanent pasture. For many years from 1878 to 1916 there was a more or less continuous decrease in ploughed land, but this was to a very large extent compensated for by an increase in permanent pasture-there was, in fact, distinct evidence of a turn-over from one category to another. Since 1918, on the other hand, notwithstanding the great decrease in arable cultivation, the movement in permanent pasture has been insignificant.' Though subsequent Returns speak with a somewhat uncertain voice, the process has gone on, and in England and Wales, in particular, the amount of land classified

gas rough grazings' has steadily increased in the last Ethree years. When all allowances have been made, the conclusion cannot be resisted that the movement to-day he is from corn to common and that, in England at least, an appreciable part of the land lately arable is going back to waste.

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Meantime, as is notorious, the rural population melts away. For the half-century before 1901, the census returns of persons employed in agriculture showed a decline of all but a million, and again, in the post-war period, there has been a loss between 1921 and 1924 alone of 63,000 persons in England and Wales. The drift to the towns, the drift to the colonies, goes on from the country districts unceasingly.

Nor do these bitter facts represent the whole truth. As the capital available for the upkeep of the farm decreases, the equipment of the land, and particularly the drainage (which is at the root of cultivation), steadily deteriorate. The loss of quantity of cultivated land is shown by the statistics. The loss of quality is not less serious and cannot be measured. But there seems to be a concurrence of informed opinion that the deterioration of drainage in the last twenty years has been almost universal in England and Scotland alike, while the housing of those who work the land has necessarily suffered first and suffered most from the diminished capital resources of the owners of the soil. It is not the success of individual agriculturalists or even the continued prosperity of favoured districts which can counteract or compensate for a situation such as this. Wealth, productivity, population are flying from the land. The desert is being let in.

If such be the position in Britain's rural estate, how is development to take the place of decline, and if there are alternative methods of development available, which of these from the point of view of a national policy and of the needs of the nation, best fits the case?

Now it so happens that opinion is definitely dividing into two opposite camps as to the direction in which that development is to be found. One school of thought declares for larger, highly-industrialised farms covering as many thousand acres as the farm of to-day covers hundreds. With the costs of management, with the

number of farmhouses reduced to a minimum, with every possible device introduced to save labour, with great capital resources behind, such a system will produce, it is said, the best possible results so far as productivity and profits are concerned. This school of thought contemplates the development of farming limited liability companies, owning and cultivating perhaps even greater tracts of land. This, it is said, is the policy economic considerations demand. Yet its defects are obvious. It necessarily means a further reduction of the rural population, both farmers and labourers. It may bring prosperity to a few. It has yet to be shown that as a result a single fresh acre would be ploughed up as a compensation for a fresh loss of rural population. Not, indeed, that the view can be accepted that this would be either the most productive or the most profitable system of cultivation. That view, so far as productivity is concerned, runs counter to the whole agricultural experience of Western and Central Europe. And as for the profits of such a system of agriculture, these would largely depend upon the relations between capital and labour. It is clear that the more industrialised the agricultural system becomes, the greater will be the gulf between employer and employed and the more formal will become their relations. The whole weary cycle of Trades Unionism might once more have to be traversed, for the coming of the farming company might well reproduce in rural labour the characteristics which industrialism has created in urban, and might give the Trades Union leader at the very moment when his authority is waning in factory and mine, a new platform in the fields.

To this line of advance, if advance it be, the alternative is the exact opposite. Instead of fewer and larger farms, more and smaller holdings; instead of the formation of a new kind of large estate, the private ownership of land in widest commonalty spread'; instead of industrialised production, intensive cultivation; instead of profits for a few urban shareholders, a livelihood for a numerous property-owning rural democracy; instead of land exploitation, land settlement. It is land settlement, not land exploitation, which will commend itself to the nation as a whole, and will best reinforce

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and harmonise with our general social structure, predominantly urban as it is and as it must remain.

For what do the essential interests of Britain require from its country estate? First and foremost, they require British agriculture to support as large a rural population as possible. Secondly, the rural economy must not only be capable of giving employment to this population, but must be of a nature to induce men and women to stay in the country districts, and even to entice the country-bred and country-trained from the cities whither they have gone. Thirdly, it requires that population to be, to the greatest possible extent, consumers of urban produce. And lastly, though of subsidiary importance, an agriculture which will create a large demand for seasonal labour, as, for example, when a small-fruit harvest is being gathered, would give to many town-dwellers an economic contact with the country by no means to be despised, in relation either to health or to employment. These are results which only a closer settlement of the land can achieve.

That the land of Britain will support a much more closely-set population than it does under a large-farm system, the land settlement, which has been in progress under the Acts of 1908 and 1919 in England and the equivalent Scottish Acts, has clearly shown. Thus, for example, in Cheshire on some 2570 acres, the permanent working population has been increased from 187 to 410. In Essex, 600 acres farmed by the owner and 13 employees supports, since settlement, 41 holders with their families, besides giving employment to a number of other men. In Perthshire, a grazing farm of 550 acres, on which 3 to 5 men were employed, now supports, and supports well, 11 small owners and their families, besides 7 hired men, and, in the same county, a group of 4 farms tenanted by 3 farmers, with 14 men and 4 women and boys in regular employment, is now cultivated either in arable holdings ranging from 50 to 25 acres, or in smaller fruit, nursery-gardening, or poultry holdings, by 53 holders and 12 women and boys.

But the full value to urban Britain of land settlement is not to be measured by the quantity of population. The small-holder has, as an economic unit, a specially high quality. It is the special virtue of the small

cultivator that, as a consumer, he is, pound for pound of his income, of exceptional merit. This, a vital factor from the national point of view, has been most amazingly overlooked and neglected. It is obvious enough to any one in contact with a group of small-holders, who have found their feet and have begun to exhibit their true characteristics. No cultivator of the soil puts so much 'back into the land' as the small-holder. And what goes back into the land, in fact, comes out of the factory. Fertilisers, implements, incubators, wire for his raspberries, wire netting for his fowls, here bricks for a new shed, there glass and timber for a new greenhouse -these are the channels in which the income of the small-holder flows. Family for family, a group of smallholders will absorb a much greater amount of industrial produce than the same number of persons, farmer and labourer in normal proportions, in the large-farm system. Acre for acre, of course, the contrast is still more striking. And of this fact, be it added in passing, social students, as well as economic, might well take note; for it would be difficult to find elsewhere in the community, on the same income, a more valuable spender than the small-holder. Certainly his heads of expenditure compare very favourably with the cinema ticket, the Saturday bet, the canary, the whippet, even the pedigree rabbit or the fancy pigeon on which the urban wage-earner of approximately equivalent income, lavishes the surplus of his earnings. Closer settlement and intensive cultivation mean for the towns a demand for their produce such as no number of syndicate or company farms will create.

Secondly, if anything can stop the drift to the cities and even entice the country-bred back to the land, small holdings, and particularly small ownerships, will do it. For the cultivation of his own soil gives to a man just that opportunity for individual enterprise, which adds savour to life. It is impossible to assess the extent of the present demand for small holdings, because, since the war, only ex-service men have been encouraged to apply, but all the indications point to the demand being large and steady. In particular, is it not reasonable to expect that the present difficulty of finding urban employment must have made many a country-bred man wish