Page:The farm labourer in 1872.djvu/16

 be found to be this—want of Hope and Prospect, want of opportunities of rising, or means of laying by for old age. One great means of producing contentment and offering a means of investment was formerly land, say enough to keep a cow on, or the run of a common even; but during the last fifty years the policy of high farming has been to do away with all these places, either by absorbing them into farms, or on the grounds that they made the men idle and worthless; and allotted as they sometimes were to thriftless improvident families there was some truth in the statement. But, meanwhile, although education, progress and prosperity went on, no compensation for the land taken away has been offered, no alternative means of rising for the best workmen was introduced, such as a general application of piece-work, or some sort of industrial partnership, giving the men an interest and profit in their work. Their interest in the soil is taken away, and no interest created in its stead except the hard and fast one of Cash-payment. What wonder if the men try and improve on that? What wonder if they follow blind guides, whose plausible arguments would not be so easily overturned even by some educated men? But if it can be practically demonstrated that the application of some intelligence and sympathy, to the question (such intelligence as the manufacturers now constantly bring to their business, and such sympathy as refuses to regard any labourer as a