Page:Pauperization, cause and cure.djvu/18

12 farms large, and the farmers men of capital, the position of the agricultural labourer will be better on the whole than where with small farms and struggling tenants, as in the south-west of England, the labourer is only employed for a few months in the year, and cast adrift to his own resources or the cold comfort of the Poor Law in winter. It is affirmed that in many parts of Hampshire, Berkshire, and Devonshire, agricultural labourers who for eight months in the year have steadily worked for the surrounding farmers, are during many weeks or even months inmates of the workhouse; or in what will be found an almost equally degraded condition, regular recipients of out-door relief every winter. This is supplementation of wages with a vengeance; this is a state of things that cannot but call for the most profound sympathy, and if it were not for practical demonstration of its unnecessity, for the most profound despair. Then as to the accidental presence of mines and manufactures in a county or district; it will generally be found that by supplying work, and so absorbing almost on the spot the surplus labour, and in a lesser degree by raising the wages and the value of agricultural produce thereby in the neighbourhood, the condition of the labourer is improved. The presence of mines and manufactures in the north may be contrasted with their general absence in the south.

But in addition to these more fundamental and less alterable causes, there are local and incidental reasons which perhaps in an equal or even greater degree affect the condition of the agricultural labourer; and seeing that there is no insuperable difficulty to their correction in any and every district in England, it is to them that more especial attention should be directed—they are chiefly these: A badly-administered Poor Law, aggravated by that pest of the poor man's home, a superfluity of beer-shops; a want of intelligent and improving landlords, and an absence of all means of investment for the labourers' savings.

The question of a better administration of the Poor Law, which, in some districts, seems to cause the very evils of improvidence and dependence it should seek to cure, would take too long adequately to go into here, more especially as some of the incidents of the southern counties of England seem almost beyond the power of Poor Law to deal with. It would seem as if labour were in excess, and that migration is the only cure. If the farmers habitually turn off their men in the winter, and there is no work for them, although, during the summer months they are required, it may be that migration must naturally correct the overplus, and machinery supply its place. This would have two effects, which the farmers, landlords, and others, should well consider. First, wages would rise, which would possibly be no loss to any one, as it has been often shown that the lowest paid labour is not always the cheapest; but secondly, the beat men would be the first to migrate. This would soon be felt as a serious and palpable loss in a district, as has practically been found in more than one previously overstocked neighbourhood. But as to the administration of the Poor Law, it may be mentioned that in the district in a west midland county, the practical treatment of which