SUCCESS OF SMALL-HOLDERS.
Pessimists on farming in England during the last . year or two seem to have turned a deaf ear and a blind eye tp the very salient success of many small-holders. Evidence of this prosperity is continually coining to the surface. I am told, by one who was present at a Lancashire meeting of small-holders, who are also ex-Service men, that they ridiculed, not without scorn, the universal groans of the larger farmers. They did not disbelieve the tale—the facts are too lamentably certain for that—but they contrasted their own satisfactory profits with the farmers' heavy losses; and attributed the contrast, first to the farmers' excessive attendance at markets, second to the selection of crops': The farmer chose to grow the crops that did not pay, and the small-holder the crops that did. There can be no questiort that petite culture, in the full sense of the word, has never paid better than during the period of deep agricultural dep sion. There has been money in the little things most genera § despised by the farmer : in poultry, for example, and rabbitS, and goats, in fruit and vegetables and, not least, in flowers: * * * *
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