National Land Company - Flaws

Flaws

As well as the obvious defects in O’Connor’s land plan that he either did not see or consider important, there were flaws in the execution:

• Consideration was not given to the difficulty that would be encountered by town people, many who had never lived in the country, in becoming farmers.
• If his plan worked, the more land he bought the higher the price of future purchases would become. His plan was built upon the assumptions that land could be bought in unlimited quantities and at reasonable rates.
• He assumed that all subscribers would be successful farmers who would repay promptly.
• Few persons would have agreed with his optimistic calculations that prosperous farming could be carried on such small scale and with the primitive methods that he advocated.
• His plan to push the Charter in the background in favour of his land plan caused a storm in the Chartist movement.
• O'Connor was left in control of the company without check or supervision. He was uninterested in record keeping and detail.
• The inherent conflict in deciding the sizes of the plots. The larger the plot, the more likely it was that the settlers would make a success of it. But larger plots also served to delay the acquisition of plots for the remaining shareholders. The smaller the plot, the more shareholders could be settled. But smaller plots also meant that it was harder for the settlers to make a living.

This meant that the settlers, who for the most part had no rural experience, were settled on plots which would be demanding even for those who had rural experience.

The size of the estates meant that the settlers generally formed a large percentage of the communities to which they were attached. It was feared that the influx of a large number of poor people could overwhelm the parish's resources as had happened at Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire in the early 1830s.

Flaws such as these were heavily emphasised by early historians. However, since the 1990s several studies of the Chartist Land Company have advanced more-positive interpretations that help to clarify why the scheme was so popular. It has even been suggested that the National Land Company was a benchmark - sometimes positive, sometimes less so - for subsequent UK land reformers.