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made and mended, and in some cases small luxuries, and house and family adornments, are indulged in, and as a consequence the tradesman, shopkeeper, and manufacturer are directly benefited.

This is no fancy picture. Catshill is a place where the decayed industry of nail-making was once carried on. The men sought employment in the manner described, and they were for a long time in a state of extreme poverty for want of it. The present writer has for years past known the locality and the decaying condition of the trade in it. He now knows personally many of those who belong to the colony. They are a fine lot of men, such as we want more of. They work hard, some of them very hard, but they are independent, well housed, have plenty of food, with good digestions, and their minds are healthily occupied in planning further improvements on their little freeholds. Recently they have taken to flower-growing. At his last visit the writer saw heaps of chrysanthemums tied in bunches by the women and children ready for a very early start in the morning for the market towns.

Further, the labour question is here being solved. Instead of the distress and charges on the poor-rate, which previously existed, there is not, at the present time, the writer is informed, an able-bodied pauper in the whole parish, while the rateable value of the land is considerably increased. Formerly this Woodrow Farm was occupied, with small success, by a single tenant, and very few labourers employed. Now there is on it a colony of families. One of these small holders, who has bought additional land outside the estate (but altogether under thirty acres), received in a single year £600 for produce raised on his holdings. In the same year he paid £240 for labour,

in addition to that of his own family. There is no mystery about this great yield of produce. It has ever been the result, both in ancient and modern times, of that intensive cultivation and heavy manuring of the land almost invariably found in connection with small farming and peasant proprietary.'

The men of this colony, with their own horses and carts, draw manure from the towns, and the quantity they place on their land is enormous. In a single year, it is stated, above 500 tons were placed on the 43 acres of allotments referred to (the Horse Course), and far more in proportion on a six-acre holding on the Woodrow Farm.

There is another feature connected with occupying ownership which the political economist does not reckon because it has no money value. Every man's happiness in life depends largely on the interest and pleasure he takes in his occupation. Nothing can exceed the satisfaction a peasant proprietor gets from his work. It is a pleasure to him to toil heavily in order to make his holding-his own homestead—a

success.

It is evident that the 5 per cent duty which Mr. Chamberlain proposes to levy on the imports of

1 "C. Furius Chrisimus, a freedman, gathered from a very small farm far larger harvests than his neighbours reaped off large estates, and so became an object of great ill-will, on the ground that he was attracting their crops on to his land by witchcraft. Whereupon he was cited for trial before the Curule Aedile. When the time came for him to come up for sentence, he brought his rustic implements into the Forum, leading in with them his strong, healthy household, well cared for and clad, his iron work excellently made, etc. Then he said: 'My sorceries, Romans, are these, and yet I cannot display before you or bring into the Forum my early watchings, vigils, and the sweat of my brow.' Whereupon he was acquitted. For of a truth, cultivation depends on the amount of work put into it."-Pliny, "Natural History," Book XVIII, Chap. vii,

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