Page:Indian Journal of Economics Volume 2.djvu/236

 '24 G.F. KEA TINGE work is done. This work has gens on vry steadily for a century and some 260,000 farms have been reconstituted ou this basis, and xYhereas the number of plots of constituting a peasant's holding gas formerly often 20 to .10, the average number is uow only 2. Of t. ho numl.er of 260,000 farms mentioned 180,000 'of the continue to live in holders, with their peasant landholders the villag:;s, and families, ne,rly a of Sweden, t. he third from toal holders othar 80,000 part, of past century their lauds now have in ,initted the village site to go and live on united into larger lotsa Italy In It. sly the Law of Inheritance allows a landowner to leave half his property as he likes, bat the other lmlf mast be divided equally amongst l:is children. Ogi. ng to this law holdings have become much sub.divided. In 189t an Act xx, as passed ghich enabled a laudhvlder having land, the net {neeroe h'om which was cdcalated at between 200 and 600 francs per annum, to constitute this land as a "family property". A 5,.rm so constituted ceased to be t. he property t)f an individual and was held jointly by the family. It also became inalienable and could uo be seized for debt. Iu 1910 a fm'ther Bill was introduced to facilitt.e the creation o[ snall farms o[ from 2'to 7 acres encl,, [o [orm which 1)easaut. s could obtain from tle Government loans on easy .terms. The farms so formed were to rema|u indivisible. The case of Russia is instructive beennee prior to 1906 a 1.xrge part of the land was held jointly by families a system somexYhat analogous to the ttiudn joint family system. With a view to improve the extremely backward and ineffective system of farmiug in Russia and to raise the peasants h'om their abject state of poverty, important agrarian legfeint, ion was undert. aken in 1906. The txyo most, important factors in the reforns instituted consisted (a) the abolition of collective family ownership, and substitution of the head of the family as the free and independent owner of the holding, (b) the rennithg in one contiguous holding the scattered plots which formerly made up the' holding. I lb/d., October--November 1910. Ibid., Feb. 1911. /b/d., June 1915. Ibid., July 191.5. Ib/d., Feb. 1917.