Under the Small Holdings Act there were, up to December, 1910, nearly 31,000 applicants, asking for over 500,000 acres. Only one-fifth of this amount was acquired, for 7,000 holders. Thirty per cent. of the applicants are agricultural laborers, and the majority of the others are drawn from the rural population who have some small business or trade in the villages and wish a plot of land for a garden. This "often makes the difference between a bare subsistence and comparative prosperity."[30] These laws show the drift of the current. The question of the nationalization of railways has been the subject of Parliamentary inquiry, and the great railway strike of 1911 emphasized the matter profoundly. The state in 1911 completed the taking over of all the telephone lines; it conducts an extensive postal savings bank and a parcels post. In local affairs some British cities are models of municipal enterprise. Even London, that amorphous mass of human misery and opulence, is changing its aspect. Since the granting of municipal home rule it has built a vast system of street railways, cleaned out acres of slums, opened breathing spaces, built tenements, and in many other ways displayed evidences of an awakening civic consciousness. Three other pieces of legislation must be described more in detail, because they are more revolutionary, far-reaching, and democratic than anything attempted by the British nation since the days of the Reform Bill. First is the famous "Budget" of Lloyd George. When this virile Welshman became Chancellor of the Exchequer he cast his budget in the mold of his social theories. He said: "Personally, I look on the Budget as a part only of a comprehensive scheme of fiscal and social reform: the setting up of a great insurance scheme for the unemployed and for the sick and infirm, and the creation, through the development bill, of the machinery for the regeneration of rural life."[31] The land system of England is feudal. Tenure still legally exists. There still clings the flavor of social and political distinction to fee simple. This the landowners have fortified against all the changes that industrialism has wrought. There has been no general land appraisement since the Pilgrims landed at the new Plymouth. The "land monopoly" successfully resisted every attack until the famous budget of 1908. Chiozza Money quotes John Bateman's analysis of the "New Domesday Book," fixing the ownership of land in England and Wales as follows:[32] In 1883, in the United Kingdom, there was a total area of 77,000,000 acres; of this 40,426,000 acres were owned by 2,500 persons. "While the total income of the nation is £1,840,000,000, the landowners take £106,000,000 as land rent."[33] England is a great industrial and commercial nation living on leased land. The development of the industrial towns has enormously multiplied the value of some of these vast estates.[34]