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In other words, he had omitted to count the whole cost beforehand, and had forgotten that he could not both eat his cake and have it. He could not make money as a ' hired man' as he used to do, and at the same time do justice to his threeacre patch. He did not fall into actual insolvency, because he came upon benevolent neighbours for subscriptions; but the resource of charitable assistance could hardly be relied upon if the system of three-acre plots became universal. This man, of course, was not literally a proprietor, but a tenant; but the very trifling rent he had to pay did not sensibly affect the conditions of his investment.

As for the successful man, he was one of those exceptions which prove the rule, and point the general moral which Mr. Jefferies is impressing on us. He had made his settlement near a populous town, where there was a ready market for fruits and vegetables. He saved the cost of gathering and housing his crops by selling them standing to gentlemen with stables. He kept pigs, whose keep came from his customers' kitchens; he obtained his manure for the trouble of carting it; he tended other people's gardens in his leisure hours, and even condescended to beat carpets on occasions. In short, he was an industrious and intelligent jack-of-all-trades, who took advantage of a combination of favourable circumstances to do something more than keep himself from poverty. Mr. Jefferies sums up the case clearly and concisely :

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If the land were subdivided in the manner the labourer is instructed would be so advantageous, comparatively few of the plots would be near towns. Some of the new farmers" would find themselves in the centre of Salisbury Plain, with the stern trilithons of Stonehenge looking down upon their efforts. The occupier of a plot of four acres in such a position-many miles from the nearest town-would experience a hard lot indeed, if he attempted to live by it. If he grew vegetables for sale, the cost of carriage would diminish their value; if for food, he could scarcely subsist upon cabbage and onions all the year round. To thoroughly work four acres would occupy his whole time; nor would the farmers care for the assistance of a man who could only come now and then in an irregular manner. . . . He could not pay anyone to assist him in the cultivation of his plot.

'And then, how about his clothes, boots and shoes, and so forth? Suppose him with a family, where would their boots and shoes come from? Without any wages-that is, hard cash received weekly-it would be next to impossible to purchase these things. A man could hardly be condemned to a more miserable existence. Imagine a

town surrounded by two or three thousand such small occupiers, let them be never so clever : where would the extra employment come from? ... Where one could do well, a dozen could do nothing. If this argument be carried still further, and we imagine the whole country

so cut up and settled, the difficulty only increases, because every man living (or starving) on his own plot would be totally unable to pay another to help him, or to get employment himself. No better method could be contrived to cause a fall in the value of labour.

'The examples of France and China are continually quoted in support of subdivision. In the case of France, let us ask whether any of our stalwart labourers would for a single week consent to live as the French peasant does? Would they forego their white wheaten bread and eat rye bread in its place? Would they take kindly to bread which contained a large proportion from the edible chesnut? Would they feel merry on vegetable soups? Verily, the nature of the man must change first; and we have read something about the leopard and his spots. You cannot raise beef and mutton upon four acres and feed yourself at the same time; if you raise bacon, you must sell it in order to buy clothes.

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The French peasant saves by stinting, and puts aside a franc by pinching both belly and back. He works extremely hard and for long hours. Our labourers can work as hard as he, but it must be in a different way they must have plenty to eat and drink, and they do not understand little economies.'

Though Hodge's masters fill a larger space in Mr. Jefferies' book than Hodge himself, there is nothing in it more graphic or more suggestive than the pages he devotes to the actual labourers. In the land legislation of the future, in any radical modifications in the farming system, the aspirations, the grievances, the necessities, even the caprices of the labourer must be taken into account. He no longer stagnates from the cradle to the grave in stolid resignation to venerable traditions. Here and there a veteran is to be found who in the rude sagacity of his experience is apprehensive of sweeping subversion, and who will answer the glib-tongued agitator who preaches the abolition of big farms by asking who in that case is to pay his wages. He has been brought up to drudgery and absolute dependence. But, as a rule, the modern labourer is a man of crude ideas, who believes that, as others are better off than he, any changes in the agricultural system must better him. It must be admitted that although wages have been steadily rising on the whole, while the cost of the necessaries of life has been cheapened, the conditions of his employment are becoming more precarious. In old times the labourer was rooted in his native parish, and could rely upon regular work, though his wages fell in the short days of the winter. notwithstanding the introduction of steam machinery, the demand for labour exceeds the supply; but the demand is spasmodic and more precarious. There is a flush of work while the hay is being saved or the wheat reaped and threshed; but

Now,

But

the temporary bursts of excessive activity are followed by lulls of stagnation. Certain hands are engaged all the year round to look after the working horses and the cattle; and these men may take an interest in the prosperity of their master. the others, who are employed by the job or piece, are naturally inclined to keep well within the letter of their contract. The married men who have given pledges to fortune, remain in their cottages when they can get regular occupation, but the unmarried hands wander about in search of work. They are apt to spend their wages in dissipation; they listen to the wild babble of idlers and agitators in the low public-houses; they are slow to marry and settle down, charging themselves with the obligations of maintaining a family; while the more industrious among them, whom we should gladly keep at home, are exceedingly likely to emigrate. One set of our labourers, roaming from parish to parish, are chronically impecunious; while another have received an instalment of the privileges of their social superiors, and have been encouraged like them to an abuse of their credit. Our own observation fully confirms the assertion of Mr. Jefferies, that the labourers, according to their means and degree, are even more generally insolvent than the tenant farmers.

'The labourer, like so many farmers in a different way, lives on credit and is perpetually in debt. He purchases his weekly goods on the security of hoeing, harvest, or piece-work, and his wages are continually devoted to payment of instalments, just as the tenant farmer's income is too often devoted to the payment of interest on and instalments of his loans. No one seems ever to pay without at least a threat of the County Court, which thus occupies a position like a firm appointed to perpetually liquidate a vast estate. It is for ever collecting shillings and half-crowns.'

The labourer's life is a hard one, but the hardships are not without their compensations, and for long it appeared to have taught him content, or, at least, to have been softened by acquiescence. He had been among employers who knew him from his boyhood as they knew his father before him; he had lived, as the Scotch say, among kent folk,' who helped him through sickness and temporary difficulties. It is true that he had to rise long before light in the bitter winter mornings; he had to huddle on his damp clothes in the dark, and drag on the stiff boots which were still as wet as when he drew them off; probably, instead of fortifying himself against the cold with a comforting mug of warm tea, he snatched a hasty meal of bread and cheese, washing it down with a glass of water or small beer. He might have to attend to the cattle in a chilling drip

of rain, sinking over the ankles in the mud and filth of the stack-yard, or face the sleet and the piercing wind as he toiled behind the plough through the holding clay. He might have to work in the ditches through the winter day, standing up to the knees in icy water. We should have thought that he was apt to lay up rheumatics 'for his old age, but it seems to be Mr. Jefferies' opinion that the constant exposure and the drenchings hardened rather than hurt him. It was of that solid labouring stuff that the most enduring soldiers were made, from the time when the peasant, following his lord to the field, handled the same terrible brown-bill he still employs for his hedging, to the days when he went countermarching in the Sierras of the Peninsula or lay out in the trenches on the storm-beaten plateau of Sebastopol. He had been used to play out of doors from his childhood in defiance of weather. If he grew up steady, he was well and substantially nourished; and as for refinements in cookery, he has always set his face against them. What he wants, Mr. Jefferies says, is something solid and bulky; and he can provide himself cheaply enough with wholesome bread and bacon, with cheese, and, above all, with his favourite cabbages. The fare agrees with him; he has a digestion that can cope with anything, and he enjoys excellent health. Then Saturday is generally a short day, and on Sunday he may fancy himself his own master, and give himself up to the lounging he delights in. Once married and comfortably settled, he has every inducement to stick to his service. He grows fond of his cottage, he takes a pride in his garden; he gets some profit out of his fruit-trees and vegetables, and he learns to value his domestic comforts.

But unfortunately, as we have observed, he is becoming unsettled in his habits, and inclines rather to keep clear of expensive encumbrances than to form family ties. The unmarried labourer at a loose end,' here to-day and in the next county to-morrow, is infinitely more exposed to temptation than the married man. He has neither home nor household; his taste for dissipation costs money; and, unhappily, he may pretty nearly dispense with a character, since, except when filling some situation of trust, masters, in engaging, seldom ask questions. That class of debauched labourers supplies the patrons of the low public,' whose proprietor lives and grows rich by leading them off their legs. Mr. Jefferies gives a vivid picture of one of these places, which are the standing nuisances of decent neighbourhoods, though it is very difficult to put them down. The men who go tippling in them day after day are encouraged to pay their scores in kind. Farming-men have constant

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opportunities of pilfering in a small way. The wagoner sent to cut hay in some lonely rickyard drops a truss at the 'public' in passing; the man who is carting coal leaves his contribution for the coal shed. Hedgers who are always about the copses and hedgerows are encouraged to trap and snare; and fowls and turkeys find their way thither as well as pheasants and partridges. The risks of detection are small, and the penalties insufficient to deter from petty offences, for no amount of convictions nor short sentences of imprisonment need seriously affect the labourer's prospects. Where he does suffer is in the deterioration of his character, and from the unwholesome debauchery that saps his constitution. To say nothing of the receiver who keeps the place, and whose business is to encourage men to crime, he is always sure to meet the worst company in the shape of tramps, thieves, and confirmed drunkards. As for the drink, it is drugged and doctored' so as to provoke an unquenchable thirst. It is a heady 'liquid, which if anyone drinks not being accustomed to it, will 'leave its effects upon him for hours afterwards. But this is what the labourer likes. He prefers something that he can 'feel; something that if sufficiently indulged in will make even 'his thick head spin and his temples ache next morning.'

The meetings in such low places of resort, the general movement from district to district, the growth of agitation, the formation of leagues, even the universal diffusion of education enforced by statute and school inspectors, are all sources of anxiety or signs of impending troubles. They all tend to dissipate those popular notions of rural felicity which formerly were more or less true to nature. They throw obstacles in the way of profitable farming, and they aggravate the increasing embarrassments of the landlords.

'The growth of a public opinion among the rural population is a great fact which cannot be overlooked. . . There have been strikes; indignation meetings held expressly for the purpose of exciting public opinion; an attempt to experimentalise by a kind of joint-stock farming, labourers holding shares; and a preaching of doctrines which savour much of Communism. There have been marches to London These are all within the pale of But they proclaim a state of mind something new and not exactly

and annual gatherings on hill tops. law, and outrage no social customs. restless and unsatisfied, striving for knowing what.'

What is certain is, that the changes we witness seem to be setting steadily towards agricultural revolution. The labourers may be justified in insisting on higher wages and standing out for easier conditions of work, but by putting this

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