ABSTRACT
The ‘intensive’ study of social conditions altogether is a comparatively new thing. The first man of any importance to apply it was the French student LePlay about the middle of the last century, but an immense increase in activity and in closeness of study of social problems has taken place in the last ten or twelve years, and nowhere more than in England and America. The closeness with which the social and economic state of small groups of people has been examined has immensely increased since then. How far this is true can only be settled by examining the social conditions in other countries where the system of land tenure is different. Many of the social and economic evils revealed by B. Seebohm Rowntree and others have been put down by a very large school of thinkers to the restricted ownership of land in England.
