Page:Pauperization, cause and cure.djvu/17



has been written and said on the condition of the unskilled agricultural labourer, his wants and his vacancies, his prospects and his drawbacks. His position has been represented on the one hand as hopeless and helpless, on the other hand it has been practically shown that his lot is in many respects more eligible than that of the town workman. Meanwhile though governments with expensive commissions, and individuals with knowledge more or less imperfect, seem to have exhausted the subject, the condition of the rural labourer, especially in parts of the south and west of England, is yet an unsolved problem.

Since in these set of questions we are nothing unless practical, it should be stated that the suggestions here put forward are founded on what has been practically done by individual and especially landlord influence in a certain agricultural district where wages are not high, and where Pauperism, audits natural concomitants of misery, improvidence, and degradation, were once rampant. Moreover since, under institutions and customs generally similar, we have now two totally different states of things existing (as in Northumberland and Devonshire), it would appear a practical undertaking to endeavour to raise up the standard of the worst by the standard of the better.

Some fundamental facts must not be lost sight of in the consideration of such a subject, because they will be found, after all that can be said and done, to have an influence for good and evil respectively. Such are, for instance, Race, Soil, and the presence of mines and manufactures.

First, as to Race or natural constitution of people which, after the lapse of centuries, can still be distinctly perceived in different counties, and that without any very great ethnological acumen. There is the Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon of the south, and the Anglo-Celt of the west; there is the Danish nationality of the northern counties, and the Gaelic Celt of the Highlands and of Ireland, differing again distinctly from one another. And this distinction, which may be traced in habits, in religion, and even in conversation, has a bearing no doubt upon condition; the Welsh waggoner will sometimes stop to argue about religion, and the Yorkshire ploughboy turn to a discussion of horseflesh; the Irish cottier will be garrulous about his potatoes and his family, while the plodding Anglo-Saxon of the south will be eloquent about want of work and wages, and the union workhouse. It is with this Anglo-Saxon of the south that we are now chiefly concerned; and on this point one rather bold observation has been made, which a practical diagnosis of the country seems partly to bear out; namely, that the line of the Trent nearly divides the prosperous from the ill-conditioned quà agricultural labourers, who being, as it were, at the base of the social polity, are most liable to the effects of what may be called natural causes.

Then as to soil, it will be found that where the soil is rich, the