Mr. Vincent explains how he came to go into intensive cultivation:  “A few years ago the doctors said if I did not go out more I could not live.  Very well, just at that time there was an outcry about the land not paying for cultivation.  I could not understand this, for as a boy at seven years of age I had to go out to farm work, therefore I never went to school.  Anyhow I thought something was very wrong if the land would not pay; so, to compel myself to go out in the fresh air, I took an allotment on the Sussex Downs to work in the early morning before my daily duties began.  I might say that I am a waiter, and have been in my present situation forty years, so you can understand I could not know much of land or garden work I could not see my way clear in the few spare hours I get to take more than half an acre of land to garden early, especially as I started knowing practically nothing about such work, but I can manage to do my half acre all alone.

“My garden is situated on the Brighton Race Hill ridge, and twelve years ago it was but four inches of soil on chalk, but I now have a foot of soil on the whole of the half acre, and year by year my profits increase.

“Yes, get the men to stop on the land in this country.  We ought not to have workhouses.  Every man could live, and live well, if he could get the land, and would work it as it should be worked.

“Farmers and landowners grumble because the land does not pay.  Now for the fault.  It is quite evident it is not the land, therefore, it must be the fault of the man.  Very well, get the land from these landed proprietors, by sale preferred, and let it out to men, not by 1000 acres, as no man can farm well a thousand acres in England; let the farms be greatly reduced, and then the land can be treated as it should be.  Most of us have children, and we all know how we love and treat them.  Treat the land in the same manner, feed it, and keep it clean, and you will have no cause to complain.  The land of old England is as good as it ever was.

“I have serious thoughts of opening a kind of school for people who would like to make $500 a year on an acre.  It is to be done, and done easily.  I do know that one man alone can manage two acres, and at the end of this year I shall be able to tell how much more he can manage alone, so under my system one can gain L 4 a week off two acres and do all one’s self.

“If the land will produce over one hundred pounds per year per acre, is it not wrong for a man to have, say, 500 or 1000 acres which in no way can he properly manage; as, in the first place, he cannot feed such an acreage, let alone keep it clean and gather in his crops?”

In truth, what an acre may produce depends on time, place, and circumstances The product of the best acre of land so situated that its product could be sold at retail in a near-by market, and which has been cultivated under the best management for a term of years, would provide a very comfortable living.  The product of other acres, measured by what they produce to the cultivator in living, declines through various grades down to almost nothing on the acre far from railroads or difficult of access.