Page:Farm labourers, their friendly societies, and the poor law.djvu/16

 from legislation, but the fear instead that his earnings would benefit, not himself and family, but the ratepayers, he consents to cross over the frontier-line, and at last to abide under the cold shade and desolating sway of the Poor Law.

There are many thousands of honest and respectable farm labourers in this country who are in a similar condition, and whose prospects are the ultimate provision from the rate; the effort to save these men from the degradation to which they submit themselves is yet to be made.

There is another class, and that a numerous and costly one, to be taken into account, the members of which recruit the gaol as well as the workhouse. As young men they were disobedient sons, idle and disreputable, whom no farmer would employ unless under compulsion. My specimen of this class is the son of a pilfering sire, his mother a slattern and a scold; his earliest recollections, probably, are of his father coming home drunk on a Sunday afternoon and finding him and his brothers and sisters crying for food, and beating his mother, for which he was sent to prison, while the wife and family found refuge in the union. In the union (he remembers it as one of the horrors of the place) they forced him to learn to read, and hence his hatred of learning. He will never work if he can help it, and calls himself a bricklayer's labourer. Now and then I see him on the farm, as an additional hand, when there is nobody better to be had, or as ostler at the public-house. He is out at elbows, out of victuals, and generally out of work. He joins a beer-house club, held at a beer-shop in the wood, which offers unusual facilities for him and other choice spirits like him, inasmuch as it is secluded and not often troubled by the police. He drinks his full share of the beer supplied in the way of fines for absence from the meetings and for oaths unawares let slip during the business hours of the club, which at a pint an oath supplies a good deal of beer. He has a turn on the treadmill, after a little preparatory training in the winter at the union, where he refused to break stones or pick oakum, and came within the definition of a refractory pauper. He manages to pick up a wife, a girl who insisted "on going out," i.e. leaving the union at the fair-time in a neighbouring town, and is married at one-and-twenty at the register office. She ends the honeymoon with a confinement, and has parish doctor and nurse, and within six months of matrimony you may see her a wretched, half-starved, and ragged woman, with a black eye, and a puny child, which cries piteously and unceasingly. He has the common luck of idle men, an accident, which gives him a right to the sick-fund of his club. He applies for union relief, and then discovers that instead of receiving as large a share of "his rights" as a former companion, who