THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, MAY 11, 1907. SMALL HOLDINGS IN ENGLAND.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8440, 11 May 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, MAY 11, 1907. SMALL HOLDINGS IN ENGLAND.

Small holdings are, metaphorically speaking, in the air just now in England. Professor Long, a recognised authority on the subject, contends that three acres are .quite enough to support a family provided the land is good and the labour skilful. Such holdings are not for town unemployed. In the hands of the unskilled the occupation of land means loss. This fact the enthusiast and the amateur should learn to accept. One may as well expect a farm labourer to clean a clock or make a batch of bread as an unskilful agriculturist to profitably work his land. Three acres will not-support a family, the head of which has not yet learned his trade. Professor Long, in an article in the London Daily Mail, describes work on holdings which have come under his notice. One grower marketed last summer £BO worth of strawberries grown on one and a quarter acres, with extraneous labour. This is equal to 30s a week, or double the average wages of the farm labourer. An educated woman, with three-parts of an acre of only moderate soil, and assisted only by a girl, makes a couple of hundred pounds a year.by growing garden plants. A gardener with three acres, grows roses and tomatoes, and did so well that he paid off a loan of £IOO in a year. These cases are mentioned to show what can be done. Flowers of various kinds, strawberries, gooseberries tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vegetables command a ready sale and return a good profit to skilled grower. Last year Mr R. Winfrey, M.P. for Norfolk, South-

West Division, published a remarkable -balance-sheet of a four-acre holding in Lincolnshire. Two acres were put down in potatoes, one in barley, and one in carrots, and mangels. The expenses were £l6 4s 9d, and the returns £59 2s 3d, leaving a profit of £42 17s 6d, to which had to be added the profit on ten pigs, fed chiefly on barley and roots. The extension of such farming, it is considered, may prove the salvation of English agriculture. THE EGYPTIAN QUESTON. In an article on "Nationalism on the Nile," the Saturday Review observes that beneath the surface things in Egypt have varied little since the present Khedive came to the throne. The paper in question points out the difference between the Indian National Congress and the Egyptian Assemblies, and describes the recent resolutions of the latter body on the general functions of government and administration as showing an incapacity for constructive statesmanship. Yet the danger does not lie so much in the Assemblies themselves, as in the backing they receive from authority. It is notorious that Abbas 11. has never been friendly to British control; unlike his father, who had some real conception of the duties of a constitutional monarch, he is full of Mohammedan prejudices, and is, unfortunately, open to the malign influences of the Pasha class, by whom the present system is intensely disliked. In the opinion of the Saturday Review, Britain . m4y have to administer another lesson to Abbas like that of 1894. A FREIGHT WAR.

A freight war in. the shipping trade between New York and Australia and New Zealand is threatened through the competition of, two German companies. The present trade is carried on by a "conference," which includes such British lines as Bucknall Bros. r Tysers, the Federal Line, and Holder Bros,, and such American coadjutors as H. W. Peabody, R. W. Cameron and Co., Arkell and Douglass, and Mailler and Quereau* Last year the sailings between New York and Australasian ports numbered. 34> of which the English line took nineteen and the American houses fifteen. A short while ago two German lines—the Hansa Company of Bremen and the German-Australian Steamship Company of Hamburg—cast envious eyes upon this shipping trade, and proposed to enter the Anglo-Ameri-can conference and take part in the sailings. These German companies wanted four or five sailings a year to be allotted to each df'them, a rather substantial share in a total annual trade of thirty-four sailings. At present the American houses strongly resent the German intrusion, and the British lines —with the exception of the Tyser line—also resent it. The Tyser line has, however, joined with the two German lines, and has just announced the dates of the sailing of three vessels (two German and one British) from New York to Australia and New Zealand. The name of the joint AngloGerman enterprise is "The United Tyser Line." The first steamer to sail will be the Trautenfels, which is advertised to sail from New York. No definite war of rates has yet been [declared by the American and British members of the conference, but there is every reason to believe that they will decline to be squeezed out of their business to make way for Germans.