"Oh," said Harry carelessly. "The question is an important one for the country. It must provoke discussion. Yes, I shall move the rejection of Fanshawe's bill if I get the chance." He put down on the notice paper, with some twenty members on the opposition side, a motion for rejection. He rose on the Friday, immediately after Fanshawe had sat down, and was called upon by the Speaker. He was content with two objections. But either of them, if established, was fatal to the bill. He argued against the small holding, which he regarded as the pastime of the well-to-do tradesman in the neighboring town, rather than as a serious method of settling a genuine peasantry on the land; and he pleaded for the farm of sixty or seventy acres. It is a matter nowadays of ancient dispute, yet he managed to say a new thing about it, not parading his knowledge--for there were too many in that House who had made land the study of their lives--but suggesting it with a deference, which took his audience. The great farm, he maintained, was a modern product, due to quite other causes than natural development. It came from the vanity of the eighteenth century, its love of spaciousness and show. The monstrous porticoed houses and the huge farms were the symbols of its parade. But in the seventeenth century, when agriculture really prospered, the small farm of seventy acres was the rule. It was at a return to this condition that policy and legislation ought to aim. He passed to his second argument. Tenancy under the State was bad. For the State was a hard landlord, and could be nothing else. It took no account of bad seasons or the shortness of money. It had to collect its revenues and rents within the year. Moreover, the idea was petty in its conception. (Here Mr. Devenish turned an outraged head toward the orator.) Legislation should aim at something beyond the immediate benefit it conferred. Otherwise let them commit the fortunes of the country to a parish council, and themselves go home. "There is to my mind one question by which all legislation can be tested," said Rames, "and that question is not: 'Does it supply an immediate need?' but 'Does it help to strengthen the character of the race?'" The bill failed according to that test. For it meant no more than the substitution of one landlord for another, and left the tenant pretty much where he was. If Mr. Fanshawe had taken a bold course and produced a just measure, with the object of creating owners, then the bill would not have failed. For the desire to possess land was the surest sign of a sound and healthy race. It was that desire in men which good legislation would try to keep alive. This bill merely fobbed them off with a miserable makeshift, and shut the door against ownership. Ownership with its obligations and its responsibility, and its response to the most primal and most durable of all ambitions, was the only policy worthy of a great Parliament.