certain want of resilience which testifies to the extent to which the fire and vigor of the race had been sapped by long-continued semistarvation and enforced submission to petty tyranny. The Agricultural Union did not, I think, appreciably raise the laborer; it only raised his wages. Instead of calling up a spirit of independence like that which animated the leader (a man, we must remember, born and bred in a cottage the property of his father, not of his employer), it left them generally, although materially better off, individually as submissive and as incapable of assertion of their personal rights as they had been through long generations of practical serfdom.

But the apathy of their hopelessness had been disturbed. The employers' difficulty had been the emigration agents' opportunity, and the plethora of labor had been relieved by the departure of a large percentage of the agricultural population. When the smoke of the struggle cleared off it was quite obvious that horizons had widened. Young men who dared not defy the arrogance of their employers found courage enough to escape from it to the railways or the towns. In this way the best young blood kept gradually draining away. The process has been steadily going on since.

The best men go. Laboring parents plot escape for their boys from the land as if they were prisoners in an enemy's country. Nobody stays of choice. You may hear former farm laborers speak of their late employers as a seventeenth century mariner might have spoken of the Moors of Tangiers, among whom he had been a captive.

Is the Laborer in Fault?

It has been said by a vigorous clerical writer that the laborer's discontent is merely a survival from the "bad, old, black past," when he really had something to complain of. All that has long gone by. It is the laborer's "evil temper" that still "provokes masters to harsh measures, harsh words, driving, and all such seemingly needless regulations as the command to keep no fowls or pigs, the tied cottages, and the domineering tone." All this is the laborer's fault, says the writer. Things are not now as they were in the times when "laborers were scornfully trampled on-and when the Church, cowed and faithless, was as little inclined as the State to help their condition." All that is gone by. Farmers and parsons have undergone a wonderful change. Like the Homeric hero they "boast that they are a great deal better than their fathers." But the laborer is bad indeed. The characteristics of the laborer are "shirking, dishonesty and negligence." "Tom, Dick and Sam abuse their employer, sit under the hedge when he is out of sight, steal his corn and meal, leave his horses harnessed and go off drinking, teach him that they have no love or gratitude, but only fear." The coloring suggests the moral complexion of a chain-gang. He might have adopted the words which Mr. Sam Weller in Pickwick puts into the mouth of a "wirtuous clergyman." "He's a malicious, bad-disposed, worldly-minded, spiteful, windictive creetur, with a hard heart as there ain't no soft'nin."

Our "wirtuous clergyman" in this case pronounces the rural villages to be in a state of utter decay, and exhorts us to build our hopes for the future entirely upon the progress of our urban population. Villages and villagers are played out.

Well, I dissent entirely. I am no believer in sudden and unintelligible changes. Farmers are much what they were sixty years ago. Clergymen are not so very different. The cut of their coats is

altered, that is about all. Their intentions are as good as ever and the influence they exert exactly as bad, as far as the independence and manliness of their poor parishioners is concerned. And the laborer is what these have made him. He is still, as he has so long been, like an eel on an eel spear. He can wriggle, but that is about all. Until he is set free we can't expect anything very great of him in the way of moral improvement. But his good qualities are only dormant, held in abeyance till the winter of his discontent is made glorious summer by the sun of-Land Reform. At any rate, whatever he is, it is the social and economical system of England that has made him so. He has been crushed under an intolerable pressure, and until that is removed we must expect his faults to be of the grovelling sort. Give him opportunity and he will be erect, and his faults will probably be what they were in Froissart's time.

How the Laborer Lives.

Let us give one comprehensive glance to the conditions under which the laborer mostly lives, and under which some people expect him to cultivate all the Christian graces. A miserable cottage which as a tenant-at-will he can only repair or improve at the risk of his outlay in labor or in money being appropriated by his employer, a life of constant hardship, wages even now barely sufficient for food, fire and clothing, the proud man's contumely, the want of hope, the long vista of thankless drudgery through which the eye looks only to rest finally upon the workhouse, the absence of anything like social enjoyment, the tyranny of drink, the capricious restrictions upon personal liberty of action which his employer may at pleasure impose, and to which he must submit or go. It is a gloomy picture.

The strange thing is that up to so comparatively recent a time Englishmen should have accepted a life like this, a life still worse than this, as their natural doom, exactly as an Esquimaux may submit unrepiningly to the rigors of an Arctic climate. An Esquimaux wants more seals; ice and snow and darkness are matters of course. So Joseph Arch's men wanted more wages, they had no dislike to their occupation or the hardships inseparable from it. The best of them had doubtless the same pride and pleasure in their work which every skilled craftsman finds in the exercise of his skill. A great change has passed over the laborer in this respect. Tillage in all its branches appears to most of them sheer drudgery, absolutely uninteresting if not positively hateful. No mere rise of wages will alter this.

Skilled Labor and Farm Wages.

I do not think I can put this more forcibly before you than by condensing here a conversation I had a month or two ago with a man of the highest farming class, engaged in the management of one of those immense farms which seem to me to be the ruin of England.

It was a very favorable specimen. The management was evidently liberal, the owner, I believe, personally kindly. But the system was

too strong. On this great farm the piecework principle was in force. "So if a man wastes his time, he wastes what is his own," said my informant. The scale of pay was high for the district. "With these wages the men save, I suppose?" I said. "No, never. It goes as it comes. The men who get most don't live more comfortably than the others." "Do they take much interest in the work?" "Not the very slightest. If it were not for the piecework plan we might as well give up." "Are the men who are now in their prime as skilled in their work as the old men used to be?" "There is no comparison." He referred to an old laborer who possessed nine arts. I will count them up. Hedging and ditching (in two varieties), dry fence making, rick building, thatching, hurdle making, sheepcage making, mowing, brewing. "You have no laborer who can do the same now?" "No, not one of them." "You mean no one man can do all?" "I mean that there is not a man on the farm who can do one of these things as it ought to be done."

Now, what is the reason of this? The general answer is "education." Education has something to do with it, doubtless. But let me read what Professor Thorold Rogers wrote in 1878 on the subject of rustic arts. He enumerates five or six, including ploughing, which I have omitted as too universal for special mention.

And he sums up thus: "Well, if you compare the work of the agricultural laborer who possesses the five or six qualifications I have mentioned with the work of an ordinary artisan who receives 35s. a week, the agricultural laborer, as regards the varied nature of his accomplishments, is inconceivably the superior of the artisan." think we must add to this that the field hand is more exposed to wind and weather than the artisan. His life is a harder one. I have known men who lately have never had a dry stitch on them from Monday morning to Saturday night.

Now, let us suppose a farm hand to have mastered half a dozen of these arts. On the land he is lucky if he gets 15s. or 16s. a week, all counted. If he gets "on the line," the railway, just with pick and spade, he gets 18s. or 20s. What encouragement is there for a laborer to learn his craft? Again. The other day, in the village where I live, there was a little semi-political meeting, held by some working-men from a neighboring town. It was a lively little business enough. But few laborers came. There was a largish group of farm hands at the door just before the speaking began. Someone, I was told, asked them if they were not coming in. "Well," says one, "we've been thinking it over. But if we come in we shall hear of it to-morrow from the master." So they went off. The yoke is never for a moment off the agricultural laborer's neck. I daresay the ganger looks after the platelayers on the line at their work sternly enough. But when a man shoulders his pick and goes home he is his own man. And that is what a farm hand never can say. Perhaps education may have helped him to feel it.

Why do men dislike farm labor? How is it possible that they should like it? Here is an occupation in which skill brings no reward, which marks a man quite early in life with an ineffaceable brand of social inferiority, which compels submission in a way almost unknown to any other, which offers no hope and does not even

task of accommodating existence to its conditions.

All this explains discontent. But it does not explain why up to some thirty years ago the sort of discontent with which we now have to deal should apparently not have existed.

Education may have something to do with it. Even what a lad learns at the village school does to a certain extent develop his imaginative faculties; and imagination is like a kite. The stronger it flies the more it pulls its flyer after it. But personal contact with men from the outer world has done more. Modern ideas are introduced, not by the schoolmaster, but by the tramp, and the traveller and the tallyman. The laborer sees himself through their eyes. And, what is more, he sees his master. The conditions under which

he labors are degrading. This is strangely brought home to him by comparison of his position with that of others. And he confounds the labor with the conditions. A country laborer's great ambition is to disguise his occupation. As far as he can he dresses like a townsman, and wishes to be taken for one.

I lately read a book called Mendip Annals, an account by Mrs. Hannah More's sister of the good work done in Somerset by those two plucky old ladies just a hundred years ago. Comparing the ordinary farmer as he is there depicted with Charles Kingsley's references to him in the forties, with what the condition of his laborers showed him to be in the fifties, with Joseph Arch's account of him in the seventies, and with what I have myself gathered from laborers and personal observation of his general character since, I should say that he had undergone less change in the course of the century than perhaps any other class of Englishman. A writer in Longman's, commenting upon Mr. Rider Haggard's Farmer's Year, says that the schools to which farmers' sons go very often do not teach them as much as the village school teaches the laborers' boys. It is hard to believe, I grant, but the tradition of class superiority is kept up in all its vigor in the farmhouse. The little Spartan, well taught or not, is reared up in the contempt of the little Helot. The consequence is that class characteristics survive in a curious way. The ordinary nonworking farmer (there are, of course, exceptions) belongs to the period of Parson Trulliber and Squire Western. He has stood still. The laborer has reached a point from which he can, inarticulately, criticize his master. And he does. Enquire why a man leaves his place. The answer varies in form, but is generally the same in substance. "He couldn't stand the way Mr. So-and-so goes on."

Now how does Mr. So-and-so go on? If we can get a clear idea of him we shall be on the way to an explanation of laboring discon

tent.

The Modern Farmer.

A century or so ago England was still the land of "characters." Uncle Toby and Lieutenant Lismahago, Commodore Trunnion and Parson Adams were popular in fiction because they were familiar in fact. The closer association of modern times has rounded off our angles into a somewhat distressing uniformity. We are too much afraid of one another not to straighten out the crooks in our natures

before a bend becomes a distortion. We show little mercy to eccentricity unless it has a powerful backer, wealth or rank or talent. People who live in a crowd learn to keep their elbows to themselves. In farming society there is elbow room and to spare. We all know the merchant skipper according to Clark Russell and Frank Bullen, and we understand that the conditions of seafaring life naturally evolve him, that any man in that position will have to fight a battle with himself not to become a brute. It is the same thing with the farmer. He is not so completely isolated as the skipper, the law is more present to him, his men are not so completely at the mercy of his temper. Self-indulgence in food and drink is qualified by the presence of his family; though very nearly, he is not entirely beyond the reach of public opinion. But the conditions of his life are such as to make him a petty tyrant unless he is superior enough to shape and fashion it for himself. Public opinion that keeps most of us on our legs, will give him no help in this. And a petty tyrant he generally is. As long as he keeps within the law he need not fear the cold shoulder among his fellows. "A man mustn't be unneighborly," they say. Now if there is one thing established by rural practice it is that farmers are farmers' neighbors. Laborers do not stand to them in that relation. Class charity covers a multitude of sins.

The non-working farmer is like Nora Creina in the song. His beauties are free "to sink or swell as Nature pleases." They mostly swell. He is under little extraneous restraint, and intellectual selfrepression belongs to an intellectual level that he has not reached. We are all subject to attacks of temper. These are suppressed by a feeling of intellectual shame. It is this which mostly prevents passing irritation from hardening into petty spite. Now for a farmer to lose his temper seems to him and his class the most natural thing in the world. "Spite" is constantly looked for as a motive in rural matters, and pretty generally found.

Rural Spite.

I must give instances. You will ask, "How do you know them to be true?" Some, of course, are taken from reports of magisterial proceedings, or the like. For others, I can only say I believe them and I know them to be believed among the people whom they concern. What is believed to be fact does, morally, the work of fact. That is enough for my immediate purpose.

Here is one. Two elderly laborers had given offence to some farming magnates before whom, sitting in an official capacity, their wives had to appear in order to obtain their share of a village charity to which their claim had formerly been allowed without question. They, poor old women, were sneered rudely away and their just claim summarily refused. The whole of the circumstances were made public in three county papers. (I am glad to say that in this case the County Council was successfully invoked.) You would think that some apology was offered; you do not know the great farmer. Here is another case. A poor man had to carry round a circular, in which he was in no way concerned, emanating from the vicar of the parish. He took it to a great farmer in the same way as to the rest of the village. It did not please him, and he spoke very angrily to