Page:The farm labourer in 1872.djvu/35

 twenty pounds) allowing them two or three acres of land to keep a cow, or the run of a cow on the farm, on payment of a rent, thus promoting carefulness and thrift, and introducing slightly the co-operative principle without a fusion of capital. The land ought to be held in connection with a farm, or an estate, so long that is as the labourer worked thereon. The results of this system, as shown on my own estate, in raising the labourers, and inducing them to save money, and so placing them in a condition of comfort and independence, notwithstanding low wages, is quite inconceivable. But the wholesale plan of giving every cottager land for a cow, suggested by a Borough Member lately in the House of Commons, would be, in my opinion, most pernicious and ruinous.

4. Something of the low estate of the labourer must, I fear, be attributed to our old enemy, the Poor Law, and the way out-relief is administered in some Unions. I trust we are gradually improving on that now; wherever a surplusage of labour lowers the rate of wages, and a bad system of Poor Law, administered from interested motives by the very employers of labour, still further depresses labour and degrades the labourer by maintaining the men in semi-starvation and dependance, a vicious circle is created that must, by some means or other, be broken through. But we are now being called