SMALL HOLDINGS SCHEME.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 907, 29 August 1910, Page 5

SMALL HOLDINGS SCHEME.

_ BIG RESPONSE IN BRITAIN. By Telegram—Press Association—Copyright London, August 2G. The land Union, tho Conservative organisation formed to fight the Budget, has requested tho "Daily Mail" to close for the present the campaign for the provision of rural cottages with small holdings for pensioners. This decision has been come to owing to tho overwhelming response. A thousand pensioners have" been provisionally selected, including ex-soldiers, ex-sailors, ex-policemen, and ex-civil servants. Writing in the "Daily Mail Year Book" on tho demand for small holdings, Mr. J. Ellis Barker' says:— "According to the census of, landowners of 1873, the only one available, 5408 largo proprietors hold more than ono-half of the soil of Great Britain, and 10,207 largo proprietors own two-thirds of the soil of the country. For every single owner of land, largo or small, there aTe many people who are landless. In a country such as Great Britain, in which millions rule, the ownership of the bulk of tho land cannot safely be confined to a few thousands. ' "A democratic form of government which gives all po.wer to 7,500,000 voters, tho vast majority of whom aro landless, and a feudal •land-svstem which confines the bulk of the land to' it few thousand bauds, arc clearly incompatible. Tho danger of an organised attack of democracy on the handful of large landowners, and the temptation to demagogues to bring about such an attack of the' many on tho few is growing from year to year. Our land system cries for reform. "The ' economic disadvantages of our land system aro clearly apparent both in toft-n and in the country. In 1841-45, 24,000,000 British people, out of a total population of 26,800,000, lived on British bread-corn. In 1901-5, only 4,500,000 people out of , a total population of 42,000,000 lived on 'British bread-corn. However, not only has' wheat gone out of cultivation,' but tho acreago of all our principal crops has shrunk in tho most alarming manner."