The system as exhibited in England is linked to a division into holdings which gives it additional significance. The holding of the English peasant is distinguished by two characteristic features: it is a unit which as a rule does not admit of division; it is equal to other units in the same village. There is no need to point out at length to what extent these features are repugnant to an individualistic order of things. They belong to a rural community. But even in a community the arrangement adopted seems peculiar. We must not disregard some important contradictions. The holdings are not all equal, but are grouped on a scale of three, four, five divisions--virgates, bovates, and cotlands for instance. And the question may be put: why should an artificial arrangement contrived for the sake of equality start from a flagrant inequality which looks the more unjust, because instead of those intermediate quantities which shade off into each other in our modern society we meet with abrupt transitions? A second difficulty may be found in the unchangeable nature of the holding. The equal virgates are in fact an obstacle to a proportionate repartition of the land among the population, because there is nothing to insure that the differences of growth and requirements arising between different families will keep square with the relations of the holdings. In one case the family plot may become too large, in another too scanty an allowance for the peasant household working and feeding on that plot. And ultimately, as we have seen, the indivisible nature of the holding looks to some extent like an artificial one, and one that is more apparent than real. Not to speak of that provincial variation, the Kentish system of gavelkind, we notice that even in the rest of England large units are breaking into fractions, and that very often the supposed unity is only a thin covering for material division. Why should it be kept up then?