With all this that is unpleasant about the new peasantry, I am bound to say that they have made one very remarkable step forward. As a body the labourers now pay ready money for their commodities, far more commonly than they did. Of course there are those of them who will always be behindhand, and who live all their lives in debt. But debt is no longer universal as it once was. Formerly every man had a score at the village shop, and very dearly he had to pay for the credit he expected and received; but the competition which beggared the small shopkeeper compelled him to resort to the machinery of the County Court, and the dread of that terrible power has scared many into economy and self-denial, and these have brought their own reward. So it has come about that the labourer who is hopelessly behindhand is quite the exception; the rule is the other way.

The

But if the agricultural labourer has been a gainer to the extent indicated, he is not a bit more-nay, he is much less-contented with his lot than he was. How should he be? The old men remember the roadsides, the wastes, and commons, and village greens, and patches of no man's land, which have gone from them for ever. donkey munched the thistles or rolled in the dust, the cow, half starved perhaps in winter, yet gained a certain sort of sustenance and picked up its livelihood under the hedge or on the green. The geese hissed at strangers intruding upon this or that patch of verdure, and brought in a few shillings, if their owner were lucky with them, at Michaelmas time. There was a charm and amusement and the excitement of a commercial speculation about it all. The men had something to come back to in the evening besides the bare walls of their cottages, the women something to do in the daytime besides. gossip and stare. The children too had their part in the game, if it was only to keep an eye on the Dickey,' and sometimes ride him if he did not kick too high. Then, too, there were always some playgrounds where the youngsters could get into mischief,' as the phrase is, i.e. where they could hope to find a rat or a weasel-peradventure, too (oh, the shocking crime!), disturb a rabbit, snare an old hare' (why the peasant should insist so much upon the age of a hare I never could understand), scotch a snake, or turn up a hedgehog. All these things are things of the past. The plain, ugly fact is patent to all who do not resolutely keep their eyes shut, that the agricultural labourer's life has had all the joy taken out of it, and has become as dull and sodden a life as a man's can well be made. There are scores perhaps hundreds-of villages where the inhabitants have absolutely no amusements of any kind outside the public-house, where cricket, or bowls, or even skittles are as unknown as bear-baiting— where the children play at marbles in the gutter in bodily fear lest the road surveyor should come down upon them. It is all very well for philosophers born and bred in Bloomsbury to discourse learnedly upon the wastefulness of the commons, or for lawyers in Lincoln's

Inn to assure us that there can be no doubt about the rights of the lord of the manor. As to the commons, I have observed that the noisiest advocates for enclosure are the advanced thinkers' of the squares and streets, the absentee squire who has outrun the constable, and is in his agent's hands, and the people afflicted with that mania called 'land-hunger.' As to the rights of the lord, again, I have observed that the word rights is getting used more and more generally as a synonym for powers, as though the two notions were identical. Right always does mean power, and power means right, to the middle man who is paid by commission or paid by the job. It would be idle to suggest to the modern land agent, autocratic plenipotentiary as he too often is, that there is some truth in the maxim- Summa lex summa injuria.' But here I am on very delicate ground:

μαθοῦσιν αὐδῶ κ' οὐ μαθοῦσι λήθομαι.

I have said that the agricultural labourer of to-day is better off on the whole than his father was with one notable and shameful exception. I may not shrink from touching on this part of my subject.

It has been estimated that during the last thirty years nearly twenty millions sterling have been spent in building, restoring, or enlarging the places of worship of the Established Church alone. I rejoice in the fact, if it be a fact.

How much has been further spent upon parsonage houses it would be difficult to guess, but the amount must be very large. The erection of schools and residences for teachers under the enactments of recent legislation has been, and will long continue to be, a sore burden to the ratepayers.

The number of country houses of the gentry that meanwhile have been built anew has not been so considerable, though it is rare to find one that has not been added to, made more luxurious, or improved in the stables, the gardens, or in the conservatories.

As to the farmhouses, it would make Gainsborough or Constable weep to see how the dear old places they loved have been replaced by mansions, or at least by ample family houses such as the scientific agriculturist-the high farmer in more senses than one-expects to bring his wife and daughters to.

Nor is this all. The cattle and beasts of burden have benefited by what has been going on. The stables and bullock-sheds, the cowhouses and piggeries, the very kennels have become commodious, substantial, costly, not seldom ornamental. On all these things no expense has been spared. But here progress has stopped. Yes! The houses of God and their ministers, the owners of the soil and their tenantry, the sheep and the oxen, the dogs and the swine, are decently housed and cared for. What have the peasantry of England done, and what is their crime, that they alone have been left as they were?

'As they were?' No! Not as they were-ten times worse than they were! Let a man of fifty ride five miles in any direction from his own door in some of the most carefully tilled counties of England, and he must be fortunate in his surroundings if he can find ten labourers' cottages that have been built with three sleeping-rooms since he arrived at manhood. Let him at the same time take a note of the houses' of agricultural labourers in which large families have been brought up-God knows how-and on which 50l. have been spent during the same time. Let him end by counting the number of dwellings that have been allowed to fall down, and from which the last occupant has escaped only just soon enough. Let him do all this, I say, and I think that man will be startled and shocked if he has any heart or any pity in him.

The peasantry are huddling under roofs which our grandfathers raised; but roofs and walls have had half a century or more of wear and tear. This one is propped up by an old dead tree, that one has been daubed with untempered mortar,' the other one has been made habitable by the wretched tenant with some old sleepers fetched from the nearest railway, or the thatch mended by his own hand with straw that ought to have gone to the pig.

Men pretend to wonder that the population of our villages goes on decreasing. It would be wonderful if it were otherwise. The peasantry have acquired migratory habits and gone into the towns from sheer necessity. We have been doing our best in our schools to teach the rising generation decency and self-respect, and in proportion as they learn that lesson in that proportion do they take the earliest opportunity to get out of the shameful hovels which cruel mockers call their homes.' ( The wrong and the sin are those of omission as far as the larger proprietors are concerned, I grant; but what then?

Non hominem occidi.-Non pasces in cruce corvos.
Sum bonus et frugi.-Renuit negitatque Sabellus.

The mischief is all the harder to deal with because the larger number of our labourers' cottages are not the property of the great landowners, but of small, sometimes very small, proprietors. These latter manage to get a very handsome return for their investments, and are quite safe in asking what rent they choose to demand. Tell them they are living in a fool's paradise, and that Mr. A or Mr. B will build some decent dwellings soon, and empty the old tumbledown shanties, and they laugh at you. I know better than that,' aid a coarse foul-mouthed old drover to me. 'Gentlemen don't like building houses for them sort of people. We ain't got no gamekeepers here, nor no gentlefolks neither!' So the small capitalist invests in the row of cottages within easy reach of the public-house, and very well he makes it pay. Even looking at the matter from the meanest point of view, it appears doubtful whether he is not more

shrewd than the richer proprietor, who tells you that the broad acres cannot run away, while labourers can and do. Ay! They can and do. But as William Cobbett said in his own strong way nearly half a century ago, Without the labourer the land is nothing worth. Without his labour there can be no tillage, no enclosure of fields, no tending of flocks, no breeding of cattle, and a farm is worth no more than an equal number of acres of the sea or of the air.'

It is when we come to deal with the results directly traceable to the general decay and neglect of the labourers' dwellings that the outlook appears most serious. Unhappily we are all too well aware that in the best times chastity never was a virtue held in very high estimation among the rural population. Two young people kept company' for a while, and the result was accepted as a matter of course. Thirty years ago marriage also followed as a matter of course, and a man was looked upon as a bad fellow who delayed to 'father his child' by making the mother his wife. Of late years this remnant of honourable sentiment has been dying out, and, by much that I can hear from those on whose information I can rely, the conviction has been forced upon me that female prostitution in country villages is by no means uncommon. The young men have no houses to bring their wives to, the young women will not be content with the ruinous hovels. So the child is born, weaned, and left with the grandmother; the young fellow slinks off into the town or takes 'a job' in some remote county-the order of affiliation is never served, and the girl goes out to service, or she hangs about the village with nothing to do, and hoists her flag again in hopes that sooner or later she may capture some weak besieger of the citadel and be made an honest woman of by bearing another's name. If this should not happen as soon as might be wished, and if youth passes and middle life is beginning, she has still another chance. A labourer finds himself suddenly a widower with three or four young children and no female to look after them.

What is he to do? The natural course would be to marry again. Formerly this used to be invariably done, and usually with very little delay. Now he tells you he can do better than that. He takes a housekeeper and pretends that he means to look out for a wife. He has not the least difficulty in finding the housekeeper, and forthwith new relations are entered into. He has nothing to gain by marriage-nothing as far as he can seeand something to lose by tying himself for life to a woman whose antecedents will not bear looking into, who has perhaps two or three children that may be anybody's, and whom moreover he has in his power as long as he can dismiss her at a week's notice.

Meanwhile, the young men, having once broken away from the parents' nest, acquire roaming habits, go to the 'pits,' run up to London for a spree, become navvies, and speedily learn the coarse vice and foul language of the society into which they have plunged, VOL. X.-No. 54.

T

and if they come back to their birthplace they come back brutalised, unsettled, reckless; always with empty pockets, and bawling against and denouncing every class except their own with a set of phrases from the new Gospel of Hate which ribald agitators ply them with. But these men do not marry; too often they return at thirty, brokendown sots, and badly diseased, and not seldom become the disseminators of such poison as I do not care to speak of.

Thus, spite of improved machinery, spite of increased wages, spite of shorter hours of toil, the labour market continues to exhibit the remarkable anomaly of a steady decrease of supply, varying inversely with the increase of demand. To explain it by saying that it is a mere question of wages is to show an entire ignorance of the facts. Taking the rural population in the mass and comparing their income man by man with that of the mass of the townsmen, I have a strong suspicion that the countryman would be found by no means the poorer of the two. As to that industrious, sober, able-bodied agricultural labourer who has to bring up a family on twelve shillings a week, he exists only in the speeches of the demagogue. Such a man in the eastern counties is not to be found; he would be as hard to meet with as a pole-cat.

The truth is you have increased the labourer's daily wages, but that is absolutely all that you have done for him. He asks for a decent home, for a chance of bettering himself, for the possibility of a future which may raise him to the rank of a small proprietor; for some prospect of trying his luck with a cow or a horse and cart; for some innocent recreation and amusement when his day's work is done; for some tiny playground for his children in the summer evenings; 2 for some object of ambition. What answer can you make to him? Are you going to point to the sign of the Chequers creaking in the breeze? Our agricultural friend refuses to take the hint, and angrily shakes his head. The very beer is so bad that it has ceased to tempt him to a debauch.

I do not pretend to be a prophet, but, looming through the mists of the future, there are some ugly shapes that seem to be frowning on us. The cry for tenant right has not yet made itself heard on our side of the Channel, but are we sure there are no mutterings of a storm whose thunder may be only the echo of the Land League's roar? I fancy, if some gentlemen were to find themselves at a farmers' ordinary on market-day, they would hear more than they expected. The great capitalists among the farmers, again, are giving up the game, and sullenly telling you that high farming doesn't pay. I think they don't mean what they say; but they do mean that farming on a large scale and in the grand style does not pay. If 2 I have seen children crying because it was holiday time at the school, and they had nothing to do at home and no place to play in!