to institutions which rested only on invariable rules of ancient custom, not on written law, and the quarrels and difficulties thus entailed brought them to an end.'

There is a curious report in 1783 concerning one of these family communities, addressed to the provincial assembly at Berri. It says

The associates only tried to cheat each other for their individual benefit. Every one wished to profit by the advantages of the association without taking his part of the charges. With many hands but little work is done. The chief of the association, it is complained, administered, but would not work. No one would tell of his individual profits, they hide their beehives and sheep, and will do nothing for the community. The real co-operative spirit is dead.

It is almost pathetic to see, in the whirligig of time, how common property and co-operative associations have been tried in every possible form in past times, and thrown aside as unsuccessful, how the new golden age was supposed to be coming with the introduction of individual ownerships, and how now the hopes of the future are centred in a return to some form of co-operation, better and bigger than before. That the method should be tried in farming, as in other trades, is no doubt well, but the prospect of success in a general application of the principle does not seem to be great. Good results have been hitherto obtained from distributive rather than from productive cooperation. The head of such a farm must be of exceptional intelligence, probity, and knowledge of business in order to succeed, and the supply of such met, as may be seen in the small co-operative shops, is very much less than the demand. Collective action, however, in the form of a dairy, where the milk of small owners could be made into butter and cheese, or in fruit to be supplied to large towns, eggs, poultry, &c., in quantities too small to be worth sending alone, might be of great use.

Much has been said of the admirable effects of common land. As to the waste,' the disposal of which has of late created so many heartburnings, the Buckinghamshire village has here useful experience to give. Roadside waste is merely a part of the adjoining fields, which before the days of hard roads was necessarily left vacant to enable vehicles of any kind to choose fresh ground, and avoid the slough of Despond' into which the direct way always sank during the winter and in wet weather, and which Bunyan must have known to his cost. Among the old Claydon papers, Sir Ralph Verney, driving down from London with his own horses, describes, as a quite ordinary occurrence, how his 'coch' was dug out near Aylesbury by a neighbouring farmer.' In a clay soil, this waste' often extended over two or three hundred yards in width, still belonging to the owner of the field. Hedges enclosing the space are a very modern invention. Under the old lax management of estates, when land was of little value, these pieces, when near villages, were taken possession of and built upon, of course without payment and without permission.

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About fifty such squatters were to be found on the Charity lands at Marsh. Sometimes the piece on which their huts were put up (it could not be called built) measured only about twelve feet square. The walls were of mud, boards, hurdles, withy, and a little brick and stone, with a pigsty alongside. They consisted often of only one room, sometimes with a loft above reached by a ladder, the slope of the roof, through which the sky could be seen, beginning at the floor. One of these,' said our informant, held two beds, and the children had to climb across their parents for to get to theirn inside, and when they got big, and the mother's father came to live wi' em, he had to do the like.' An eye-witness described

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The squalid misery of the poor wretched woe-begone men and women, above all of children, from whom happiness of any wholesome kind seemed hopelessly gone. Hungry, half-starved families crowding round a miserable bowl of potatoes, often without a bit of bacon, eked out with bread and weak tea. Miserable girls of fifteen and sixteen, with still more miserable puny babies in their arms, clothed in rags, illegitimate children, as a matter of course, with such houses, and the reckless sullen fathers ready to hate and curse, and, with very little encouragement, to do worse.

Pig-stealing, thefts of all kinds, hardly any honest labour, lawlessness and misery within, filth, undrained and unclean surroundings without, gave little encouragement to the idea of the advantages to the labourer of settling on the waste.'

There is another kind of waste-the heathery commons and rough corners of land. The quantity of these has been enormously exaggerated. The returns in 1875 showed the amount of common land to be 1,524,617 acres, the greater part mountain sides and rocky slopes in Wales &c. fit only for sheep. The waste consists everywhere of the worst land of a country,' said Lord Salisbury to a deputation of the unemployed who proposed to cultivate it, as a panacea for the improvement of the agricultural working class. The waste lands are the bad lands of a country. If at present it does not pay to cultivate good land, how can we hope much from the results out of bad?' Those acquainted with districts like the No Man's Land in the New Forest know the sort of poaching, thieving, wretched life that is led by the people, the hovels in which they dwell, their neglect of cultivation and sanitary requirements, &c. In a journal by John Smith, of Nibley, born in the 'sweet and salutary aire of Cotswold,' and priding himself on being a 'hundreder of Berkeley,' he mentions, about 1610

the observation of many wise men, 'that the more large the waste of grounds of a manor are, the poorer are the inhabitants.' Such commons or waste grounds, used as they commonly are, yield not the fifth part of their true value, draw many poor people from other places, burden the township with beggarly cottages, inmates, ale houses, and idle people, where the greater part spend most of their days in a lazy idleness and petite thieveries, and few or none in profitable labour. Most of the Scotch boroughs have found out these evils and sold their commonties.'

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Economy in the use of man's labour, of all the most valuable and expensive, is the object sought after by the best thinkers. Mr. Jenkins, secretary to the Royal Agricultural Society, says that 'in England seven and a half persons are engaged in cultivation of one hundred acres of land, nine per cent., that is, of the whole population, which may be said to amount to eighty-five for each hundred acres, leaving seventy-seven and a half who can be otherwise occupied.' In Belgium, which is held up for our imitation, the proportion of the population is eighty-eight to every hundred acres of cultivated land. Thirty-one per cent. are engaged in agriculture, i.e. twenty-seven and a quarter of the eighty-eight are engaged in tilling the soil, leaving only sixty and three-quarters who can work elsewhere. As to the comparative food of the two nations, the average consumption of meat per head in Belgium is forty-three pounds per annum, as against ninety-five pounds consumed in England. France is one of the countries most extravagant in labour. M. Bonnemère declares that five to six millions in England perform the agricultural work which it takes more than double the number in France to accomplish, while they obtain less than half as much produce.3

To diminish the cost of production is the great object of all economic calculation, while the new doctrine is, that the largest number of hands should be employed in performing agricultural work to restore the labourer to the land,' as it is called. In this case Russia has achieved the highest result of all. She employs more men to produce less corn than any other country, i.e. eightyfive per cent. of population to produce sixteen hectos. Italy comes. next in the scale, while Great Britain employs only twelve men to produce forty hectos of grain.

The experiment of cutting up large estates into small properties all over the country, which is the panacea of the new land reformers, has been already tried in Russia. In a report (1885) to Parliament by the British Consul at Taganrog, we are told that the rich and influential class of landed proprietors is fast disappearing, the majority are ruined. When the serfs were emancipated in 1861, a portion of land from eight to nine acres per head was allotted throughout Russia to the peasants, who naturally took to cultivating their own ground. The landowners had great difficulty in obtaining labour, they attempted an improved system, with machines, on their properties, with money borrowed from the Land Banks. They knew little of farming, however, and did not generally reside on their estates, while their stewards only looked after their own interests. Taxes increased, bad years followed, the interest was not paid, thousands of mortgages were foreclosed by the banks. One-half at least of these estates cannot be sold, though the village communes, where there had not Agriculture is the art of making the earth produce the largest crop of useful vegetables at the smallest expense.'

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been land available to give the legal proportion, have bought many of them.

'It has taken only thirteen years to ruin the landed aristocracy of Kussia, who are being everywhere replaced by peasant proprietors; and the same fate seems to be in store for a large number of the little owners who work out the soil and are utterly improvident. As almost the whole country will be in the possession of bankrupts, the system is fraught with serious consequences for the country. The greatest poverty prevails, and capital cannot be employed under such conditions. The amount of land which was considered enough twentyfive years ago to enable the peasants to live is now quite insufficient, when communal and government taxes have all increased, the price of corn has gone down, and the seasons have been bad. Agriculture is wretched, scarcely any manure is used, the produce is from two and a half to four and a half of the quantity sown, whereas in England it varies from fifteen to twenty. Although rents are only about 28. an acre for large holdings, and for garden ground from 11s. to 158., the peasants cannot at the present time live and pay their taxes. Their cattle are often seized, but more often the taxes have to be remitted. The peasants constantly renounce their allotments, varying from eight and three-quarters up to forty-seven acres, and pay an annual tax (obrok) to the commune to be allowed to go and work elsewhere.' The freedom of the English labourer to carry his labour where he pleases, unclogged by the tie of land which binds the peasant proprietor in France and elsewhere, is said by Mr. Chadwick to be a great advantage to him.

Last of the forms in which land is held is the peculiarly English one of allotmer ts, and here, too, the Buckinghamshire village has some extremely instructive experience to offer.

The question has become a burning one, making and unmaking Ministries, and used as a party weapon of offence, while few speakers or writers on the subject have taken the pains to refer to that not very recondite form of information, the Parliamentary Blue Book. In a report, 1882, by Mr. Druce, one of the assistant agricultural commissioners, he gives the latest intelligence concerning allotments and little takes, having carefully examined fifteen of the Middle and Eastern counties of his district. The five Northern counties may practically be left out of the calculation, as the condition of farm labourers is there different, and their wants are supplied in a different manner. Wages are very high, and the labourers very prosperous; they live to a great extent in the farmhouses, and the farmers give cow-runs (far more healthy for the cow than three or four acres), and a portion of the ploughed manured land for potatoes, a great advantage, as these require more fresh ground than one small patch can give.

Taking the Midland counties as a whole (he says) almost every village has its allotment ground, ranging from one-ighth to half, and sometimes a whole

acre. They are let at reasonable rents, when it is remembered that the holders pay no rates, taxes, or tithe, have no roads or drains to keep up, and no buildings to keep in repair.

The number of allotments in England is very large-242,312, exclusive, be it remembered, of large gardens. In Leicestershire the number of allotments is greater than that of the labourers-17,168; Northampton, 16,447; Suffolk, 11,664; Warwick, 12,794; Wilts, 16,445; Buckinghamshire, a small county, has 8,632. Individual landowners, such as Lord Tollemache, have whole districts let out in allotments. There are 900 on Lord Pembroke's Wiltshire estate alone; Mr. Mark Rolle has 1,000; the Duke of Bedford 2,079, &c. It is not, however, the large numbers upon great estates which raise the total so much as those on the land of smaller proprietors, glebes, common lands, &c., which are to be found almost everywhere.

But it is not in all places that they are found to be popular. In a great number of instances they have been thrown up by the labourers. Lord Fortescue mentions several cases on his own property of good land let at agricultural rents. At Marsh Gibbon a field of one hundred acres and another of twenty-five were divided about forty years ago into plots from one to one and a half acres, with larger takes up to fourteen or fifteen acres in grass. These were all worked out, corn crops having been grown successively with hardly any manure, and the land utterly ruined, when it was let to a farmer for almost nothing. The twenty-five acres were divided between ten or twelve labourers, and also thrown up. Thirty acres of grass land close to the village were cut up into thirty allotments, the last of which was given up about five years ago. In many cases the labourers part with their portions, and sometimes fourteen or fifteen fall into the hands of one man, showing that the rent was not too high, forming a little farm, to which there is no objection, but proving that the supply exceeded the demand. They are often neglected and left in a very foul condition; while labourers in general much prefer a large garden near their cottages, the supply of which is very large.

As for small holdings, Mr. Druce declares that the most remarkable results shown by the tables given in the reports, in the face of all that has been said about their deficiency in England, is that nearly three-quarters of the farms are of 50 acres and under in size; of the remainder the largest part are from one to three hundred acres.

He considers that the owner is far worse off than the occupier:

If a man has 1,000l. to spend, he can buy ten acres of land, and have still sufficient capital to work them; but as a tenant-farmer he can farm one hundred acres with a capital of 101. an acre, and will make more money, as he has the advantage of using his landlord's capital at very low interest, whereas if he buys the land the money is sunk.

The comparison between the results of foreign and English systems, by so competent a judge as Mr. Jenkins, who has studied the question in France, Belgium, Germany, and the North, is thus