Page:The English Peasant.djvu/79

 inconceivably cruel. Nearly a thousand Wiltshire peasants were present, and it was a heart-rending sight, when the moon shone out from time to time behind the clouds, and revealed the upturned faces worn with anxiety, want, and hunger.

Nearly twenty years later, Elihu Burritt, in his walk to Land's End, relates the result of a conversation he had with a hedger in Wiltshire. After detailing his own hardships, the man told him "that his son-in-law had six children, all too young to earn anything in the field, and he had to feed, clothe, and house the whole family out of eight shillings a week. They were obliged to live entirely on bread, for they could not afford to have cheese with it. Take out one-and-sixpence for rent, and as much for fuel, candles, clothes, and a little tea, sugar, or treacle, and there was only five shillings left for food for eight mouths. They must eat three times a-day, which made twenty-four meals to be got out of eightpence, only a third of a penny for each."

Thus, in the progress of modern civilisation, the English agricultural labourer has been a constant loser. From a condition in which he might hope, by industry and thrift, to become a small farmer, he can now hope for nothing better than to perform like a hireling his day, and then to find a pauper's grave. One privilege after another has gone, until at last he is driven from the land which the toil of many generations of his ancestors has rendered fertile, to burrow with his children in the slums of some outlying village, and thence to trudge with gaunt face and discontented heart to and fro from the scene of labour, no longer sweetened by bygone memories or future hopes.

There are times when the yearnings of humanity claim to be heard, and when those who, from any motive, good or bad, have allowed themselves to be carried away by the tendencies of the day, will be forced to exclaim with the greatest of modern English agriculturists, "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look around, and not a house is to be Seen but mine. I am the Giant of Giant Castle, and have eaten up all my neighbours."