Page:The Land Question.djvu/22

22 with in the village. On the contrary, those who have actually worked at the business of giving people land know that it is just the labourer who is the slowest to take it, and that almost every kind of small tradesman or craftsman in the village is more ready to take land and more apt to turn it to good account than the labourer. Let me briefly enumerate the occupations of some of the small holders in the Yorkshire village of Linton, with which I have had a good deal to do myself. They are as follows: an innkeeper, a carrier, a grocer, a lock-keeper, a carpenter and blacksmith, a fisherman, a pig-dealer, a shoemaker, and a small miscellaneous dealer. Again, in the Worcestershire village of Astwood Bank, where nail-making is carried on, about sixty acres just outside the village are held almost entirely by people who are not agricultural labourers. It is indeed this class of people whom the land-reformer must desire above all others to encourage; for they bring to the land the intelligence that comes from business-pursuits and they make an enormous deal more out of the same acreage than any farmer will make. The right of the village to take up land for small holdings should therefore not be confined to the benefit of the labourer, but should be used for people of every occupation; and the more of them that will take land, and the larger the area of land that they will take, the better. The rent, owing to expenses of collection and also to preliminary expenses of fencing and other matters, must necessarily be somewhat higher per acre than the farmer's rent; but there is no excuse for the gross overcharging that is often practised by people who do let out such pieces of ground. The result of a good many experiments with which I have been connected is that land which is let at twenty-seven shillings per acre in large quantities to the farmer can without loss be let at forty or forty-two shillings in small lots; and I believe that after the system gets well to work this rate may be somewhat lowered.

It is indeed time that the English people awoke to the importance of developing the village and the industries of the village. Instead of forcing everybody into the great towns, we ought to endeavour to carry out industries and plant them in the country. It would make a great difference in the happiness of England if there were more distribution and less congestion of our industrial