Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/245

 details of that day's work. Those already given may perhaps be considered more than enough. Whatever may be the condition of that village now, what has been said conveys, as far as it goes, a strictly accurate description of what it was at that time.

Ten years after my visit to the English village I have attempted to describe, it happened to me to pass a few weeks in a Scottish village. I made a few notes on the matters which in the Scottish village chiefly attracted my attention. It will be seen from what is put down in the following section of this chapter that the condition of the inhabitants of the Scottish village was better than that of the inhabitants of the English village, in so far as their cottages were not in ruins. But in other matters, such as their being obliged to eat bread made of damaged flour and to submit to their little crops being destroyed by the landlord's game—against which grievance they were totally without redress or remedy—their only remedy being to leave the land where they and their forefathers had dwelt for centuries—it may appear a little doubtful whether the people in the English village or those in the Scottish village were in the most unenviable condition. The people in the