The tradesman still gets all the money that is forthcoming, and he is able to sell his second-rate, or even damaged articles to those who are in his debt, not by any means at a reduction. If the purchaser goes then to another shop, the tradesman has his remedy in the County Court, and a payment of his score at some small sum per week; but, for the most part, he trusts to getting as much as he can by instalments each year at the time of harvest, and harvest-money, of which more hereafter.

Thus then, after the first year or two, the labourer is found in a condition of chronic debt, from which he only emerges if he be so fortunate as to have only sons born to him, and if they, at far too early an age, are sent into the fields to earn their living instead of being kept at school.

The weekly expenditure of an average labourer's family can hardly be brought lower than the table here presented, which is carefully compiled from the averages given by several labourers' wives, in more than one district, the details varying slightly in some cases:—

Weekly Expenditure of a Farm Labourer, his Wife, and Three Children.

It will of course be objected that the weekly wages do not represent the whole income, and this we have admitted by the mention of harvestmoney. To what sum, then, do the extras amount, and in what way is it made up ?

First, then, there are some agricultural operations, such as turniphoeing, mowing, reaping-where these last are not done by machinerytrenching, clearing copses, and the like, which are almost invariably done by piece-work, and at these the labourer may no doubt earn from three to four shillings a week more than at the rest of his labour. But he earns it by extremely hard work, for which he should be paid higher, whatever wages ordinarily are. He works later, at a rate, and in a manner, that he could not do continuously. If, as it may be hoped, even larger share of ordinary farm work shall be in the future done "by the piece," it is quite certain that it cannot be done with the same spurt and élan which now is put into what is exceptional, casual, and limited in time.

In some parts of the country "gristing" is given as part of the wages, the actual sum in money being lessened by the value of the "gristing,"

VOL. XXIX.-No. 174.

33.

estimated, it must be allowed, at a low rate. Gristing is simply wheat to make bread, and as it is independent of the fluctuations of the market, it has been in some cases a very great boon. But in the case of a hard and grasping master, or even in the case of a good master, when a part of his corn has been less good than the remainder, it stands almost as a law of human nature that the poor man, who must take what is given, should not get the best. A black and musty loaf was exhibited not long since at an open-air meeting in a western town as a specimen of bread made from gristing, which had been given as part wages, and for this the man who carried it was offered, not by his master, but by another farmer, ten shillings for the loaf rather than that it should be seen. Taken, however, at its best, gristing is either a perquisite or a charity, and both are objectionable.

Beyond this there is generally a certain lump sum given as harvestmoney for extra time in loading and getting home the wheat, amounting, perhaps, from a pound to thirty shillings a head. These things, all taken together, and at their highest computation, amount to, perhaps, two shillings a week beyond the nominal wages, that is to say, that the labourer at a nominal ten shillings a week may possibly earn for his family, not 261., but 281. 16s. per annum.

We have not noticed that on which the farmer often insists greatly, the extra beer, and sometimes the malt to make beer, which is given at hay and harvest time. The latter, which is the least objectionable, is less prevalent than the former, but it is no gain to wages. If beer is not supplied, the worker in the fields drinks but little at his own cost, and quite as often tea or cocoa as beer or cider, and goes home at night tired but sober. Liquor which he drinks at another's cost is generally taken in so great quantity as to make him wish for more, the evening is spent at the public house, where of course his own money is squandered, and the harvest money materially lessened by the score against him at the "Duck and Trumpet."

So much for wages. It will have been seen that in the schedule of expenses given above was an item for rent. Cottages are held in various ways. In some cases nearly all the houses in a village are let with the farms, and are sub-let by the farmers to the labourers, the rent being deducted from their weekly wages; in some they are held of the landlords direct; in some, where cottages have been let on lives, from some owner who has no relation to the soil. But this rather affects the conditions of tenure than the rent, which is paid directly or indirectly, averaging about eighteen pence a week, for a cottage and a few perches of garden ground, enough in a favourable year to grow potatoes for the family consump tion. The farmers, as a body, greatly discourage their men having more than this. Up to this extent they have been willing that the men should have a garden or an allotment, often indeed give to their carters and best labourers a piece of newly broken ground for a year's potatoe crop-it must be remembered that the potatoe clears and cleans the ground admir

ably for the next year's growth-and they have not unfrequently allowed the men an hour's use of the plough and horses to get the ground in order. But any such extent of ground as would grow more than a few potatoes and cabbages, any keeping of a pig, much more of a cow, is the farmer's detestation. He distrusts his men, and thinks that his grain, his hay, and, still more, the time that is his due, would be purloined if the labourer farmed ever so small a territory, and kept stock to however small an extent.

The cottage itself is, in many of our rural districts,-and in spite of much, very much that has been done by kindly landlords, filled with a real sense of their responsibilities,-a scandal and disgrace to England. We could point to village after village, and name them by their names, in which there are houses inhabited by whole families, in which there is but one bed-room; many with only a sort of outer lobby or landing which serves as a room, and one only regular 'chamber; three rooms are quite an exception in almost all our older village tenements. The sanitary arrangements are in keeping, and even ordinary personal cleanliness is out of the question. Yet it must be said, and said most emphatically to the honour of our poor, that many of the evils which might be thought to be inseparable from such a state of things do not exist, and those who know their real condition wonder, not at the vices of the poor, but at their many virtues, which shine all the more brightly under so unfavourable circumstances.

It is obvious, from what has been said, that the work of women and children in the fields has been in many districts an absolute necessity, in order that the scanty earnings of the labourer himself should be eked out. People unfortunately do not read Blue Books, which are repulsive in their form, and difficult to obtain; but if any of our readers care to go into this matter, we would advise them to obtain the Report of the Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture. The information obtained by these gentlemen, and particularly by the Hon. Edward Stanhope, who brought to his work hereditary zeal not unduly biassed by his hereditary Toryism, throws more light on this position of the subject than any other work we know.

It is in women's labour in the fields that the real evil of the cottages comes out. Delicacy has there been sapped, and the woman takes her part in the coarseness of the fields. Her presence is no restraint on language. She becomes in all but sex a man among the men. Those husbands and brothers who have the finest instincts among the labourers, feel it a deep degradation, even when they must submit to it, that their wives and sisters have to work in the fields. There is a certain poetry of motion in the long lines of women who toss the hay after the mowers, and bind the sheaves where the reapers have laid low the corn, and the picture of a Ruth when

She stood breast high among the corn,
Clasped by the golden light of moin,

is a fair one, but the beauty is like that of the woodland cottage she lives in, and will not bear too close an examination.

Recent legislation in regard to the children may do much, unless our present masters see fit to reverse it; but nearly up to the present date there has been nothing to prevent the merest children doing men's work, when they should have been at school. It is true they have often done it well. The writer of this article has seen in one field fourteen ploughs at work at once, each with its pair of horses, each furrow a straight line that was a real pleasure to the eye to rest upon, and only four grown men among the whole. Mere boys were driving the plough, and the farmer with engaging candour stated the case quite plainly. He said in so many words that a man's wages were nine shillings, and that with his eye and his head carter's over them the two boys, at three and sixpence a week each, were at least as good as a man, so that by the employment of two boys he saved two shillings, and got a man's work for seven shillings a week.

The clergy, no doubt, would have wished to keep the children at school, and teach them at least the catechism; but they have been powerless, and even in the rural districts where the church has not, we are told, lost her hold upon the masses, the ignorance which is manifested at times is quite equal to that which so shocks our excellent London Police Magistrates, when some poor little mortal does not know where he will go to if he tells a lie. We know a country parish where a lad, one of a large unthrifty family, carried a gun and discharged it loaded with powder to scare the birds before he was six years old. At that tender age his clergyman was a zealous man, and an earnest evangelical, who did all that he could for the parish and the people. To him succeeded a no less zealous high churchman, who, had he lived, would certainly now have been in the foremost ranks of ritualists. Both these gentlemen had Sunday-schools and evening classes, to which they gave their utmost attention. But at the time of Sunday-school and church our young friend was scaring rooks, and on week-day evenings was far too tired to attend a class. Another change in the parish, and there came a broad churchman, who tried to use the machinery of his predecessors, but again without success on this lad, and many another like him. The Bishop gave notice of a Confirmation, and among the candidates came the lad in question to his parson.

"Well, Tom, do you know why you want to be confirmed?"

"They tell I 'twill do I good."

"You don't know much about it yet, do you, Tom?"

"No; I do 'low I don't."

"Have you ever heard of Jesus Christ? "

"I think I've heerd tell on him, but I b'ent sure."

And this was a lad who, if he had found his way to church, would possibly have found himself confronted by an alms' dish, held out for a problematical penny to send missionaries to the Fiji Islands.

Another little lad whose "first years'

were not allowed to be spent

in "books," and who, being sent to "work" preferred "healthful play," tossed up a button with a boy of his own age which should hold the muzzle of a loaded gun to the body of the other and fire. They were sure as there was no shot in it, that it would not hurt, but only make them jump. Fortunately the gun was directed to the part to which, had they been at school, the cane would have been applied, but the result was to scoop out a piece of flesh quite cleanly, so that the wound looked exactly like a pomegranate, out of which a tablespoonful had been extracted; and the boy, for whom the button had fallen wrong side upwards, spent many weeks in bed, in the position of one who swims. The two poor little boys in Alton Locke, who said, "Turmits is froze, and us can't turn the handle of the cutter," are types of a large class, whose ignorance and whose sufferings have long called imperatively for redress.

Under no circumstances is real field work suited for women or children. Machinery will, of course, do much, as it has done already, to simplify and alleviate the disagreeables and difficulties of the work, but it can never be free from much that is hard, severe, discomfortable, deserving good pay. To those who think it is such pleasant and picturesque employment, that the labourer's life is an idyll, only needing to be translated into words, we would recommend that they should go, not only on some fine summer's evening when the heat of the day is declining, "with Thestylis to bind the sheaves," but with Roger on a foggy November morning, to spread rotten muck over the heavy clay land; not only to "hear the milk sing in the pail, with buzzings of the honied hours," but to milk those same cows at four o'clock in winter, when the frost is on the grass, and a keen north wind blowing across the pastures.

Those who have lived in the country and among the poor, though they have seldom admitted to themselves how hard and joyless was the lot of the tiller of the soil, have yet had a consciousness of the fact, and have endeavoured to mitigate it in many kindly ways. It is quite impossible to overstate the really charitable intentions of the country clergy, and country squires' wives and daughters. And though it may be doubted if the charity has always partaken of the character of mercy as described by Shakspeare, it has certainly been like it in that it has blessed the giver. Nothing has more tended to subdue the stiff dogmatic zeal of many a country rector and curate than that some troublesome ranter has fallen sick, and needed not only prayers and exhortations, but beef-tea and arrow-root, and nothing has so helped to free many a girl's mind from the artificialness and "petty dust" of society than the visit of comfort to some hard worked village drudge, and the humane sympathy brought out at the bedside of a sick child.

But when all this is admitted, it must be asserted that except in that matter of human sympathy which would be more precious without the material gifts, parish and private charities do not bless the recipients. They are simply palliatives to make men forget the insufficiency of wages; they foster unthrift and perpetuate dependence. We scarcely know a