But movement, either towards breaking up existing holdings or throwing them together, will be extremely slow.  The one process means building new houses and buildings, which is prohibitive in price; and the other, also fresh building and the abandonment of hearths and homes, which is prohibited both by price and by sentiment.  Any change in either direction is almost prohibitive to the new poor landowner class, because if one makes any change, except when a tenant dies or moves of his own accord, one forfeits a year’s rent.

I have not yet mentioned the difficulty about capital.  Under our British method, if a man wants a farm he must have capital—­about L10 per arable acre and about L5 for grass.  This is a great bar to freedom of experiment and the greatest bar on the way up the agricultural ladder.  There ought to be free access to our farms by town brains, which can often strike out new and profitable lines if given a chance.  It is not good for agriculture, and it does not promote that sympathy and contact and interchange which should exist between town and country, that a start in farming should need a heavy supply of capital.  If our landlords were better off they might well try some of the continental systems, under which the landlord provides not only the farm and buildings, but the stock and equipment, and receives in addition to a fair rent for the land half the profits of the farm.  But it is vain to hope for this under present conditions, and, for good or ill, the newly rich does not buy land.  He knows too much, and he can get what he wants without it.  He may lease a house, he does take shooting, but he won’t buy an estate.

When thinking of the importance of freedom of experiment and of a ladder with no missing rungs, I have my mind on the possibility of the owner of one estate of from 5,000 to 10,000 acres throwing all the farms and many of the fields together and making his best tenants fellow-directors with him of a joint enterprise, one doing the buying and selling, one looking after the power and the tractors and implements, one planning the agricultural processes, one directing the labour and so on.  This gives a prospect of the greatest production and the greatest profit, and it gives a really good labourer a chance which at present he has not got.  At present, unless he leaves the land, in nine cases out of ten once a labourer always a labourer.  My vision would give him a chance to become, first, foreman, then assistant manager, manager, director, and managing-director.  It ought to be tried—­but how one’s tenants would loathe it, and quite natural too!  At present if things go wrong, if it’s not the fault of the Government or the weather, it’s the farmer’s own fault.  On my joint-stock estate every director and manager would feel that all his colleagues were letting him down and destroying his profits.  It is hard to make people accept at all readily, in practice, the teaching that they are their brothers’ keeper.