H.—: Large and Small Farming (p. 154)

On this problem, so far as England is concerned, it has to be remembered: (1) that the substitution of large for small farming in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was closely associated with the movement for the enclosure of the “open” or intermixed fields; see hereon, Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (1907), and Hasbach, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer (Eng. trans. 1908); and (2) that the position of affairs has been greatly affected since Mill wrote by the shock to “cereal farming” caused by the influx of cheap American grain in the eighties: hereon, see Levy, Entstehung and Rückgang des landwirthschaftlichen Grossbetriebes in England (1904). Materials for an opinion on the economic prospects of small farming in England are to be found in Lawes and Gilbert, Allotments and Small Holdings, in Journal of the Royal Agric. Soc., vol. iii. 3rd series (1892); in the Report of a Departmental Committee on Small Holdings (1906); and in Jebb, The Small Holdings of England (1907). They are evidently bound up to some extent with the prospects of agricultural co-operation (in the purchase of fertilisers, the sale of produce, &c.), of which an account is given in Pratt, The Organisation of Agriculture (1905), and in the publications of the Agricultural Organisation Society. A general comparison of Large and Small Farming following, criticising, and supplementing that of Mill is presented by Nicholson, Principles, i. (1893) bk. i. ch. 9.

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