The annual Report of the Colonisation Commission on the German
settlements in the provinces of West Prussia and Posen is summarised by the Berlin correspondent of the Times in Tuesday's issue. Between 1886, when Bismarck's law was passed, and the end of 1909 the excess of expenditure over income has been £21,736,668. Of the 370,562 hectares of land acquired at a price of £17,500,000, about 70 per cent. has been bought from Germans and only 30 per cent. from Poles. The total German population of the settlements is estimated at 122,200 persons, and the average size of the holdings recently created is 12.16 hectares, or about thirty acres ; whereas seven-eighths of the land acquired consisted of estates averaging about thirteen hundred acres, and in the opinion of Prussian landowners the country in question is essentially unsuitable for small holdings. Coming to the question of price, it appears that the Commission has now to pay five times as much for land as it did twenty- four years ago: the proportion of Polish land acquired tends to decrease—last year it was less than one-sixth of the total— in short, "the 'colonisation' of 'Polish' land is still, in fact, to a great extent nothing more nor less than the settling of German peasant farmers on land already German."
Previous page
