is abundant and cheap, a coat of whitewash, a few tiles on the roof, or some tough timber to build a new pigsty or hovel, are usually about the extent of their requirements. As usual, my cottage tenants pay their rents cheerfully and punctually. The few exceptions are not the people who have lived their lives on the estate and will die there, but navvies and new¬ comers who earn higher wages and arc often worse off than the old class of agricultural labourers, and who have come into cottages which are no longer wanted for men whose work on the land is gone.
The rents here run from two pounds for the smaller, older and more remote cottages to four pounds for the newer and better ones; a garden is always included and the rates are all paid by the occupiers. It is very- unusual in this country and in most others, I believe, for cottage tenants to pay their own rates, but I introduced the system when the franchise was extended twelve years ago, and I think with the best results. Anyhow, there are fewer changes at Michaelmas in this parish than in almost any other about here, and though wages arc low I believe that the people arc far more comfortable than in Essex and other counties where the wages are very much higher and also more irregular.
What can be worse for a labourer’s family than the annual or biennial move which takes place on many farms ? For two or three days after Old Michaelmas-day the roads will be full of waggons moving labourers' furniture and goods from one farm to another, often only a few miles, but always with loss, damage and discomfort to the family and furniture, and often only because the farmer and labourer, soured by hard times, cannot or will not make up their little differences by a friendly word. I believe political agitation and the giving of votes to men who are often much too ignorant to understand what they are voting for has done more than anything else to bring about this want of the harmony between master and man which is essential to the well-doing of a farm.
Farmers are only human, and not angels as they ought to be, and what can be more galling to a farmer’s feelings than to know that men whom he has known from boyhood, with whom he has never had an ill word, whose families he has helped in sickness, and whose carelessness of work, indifference to their employers’ interests, and other little foibles, he has tried to bear with, will go and vote blindly for a man who, the employer rightly or wrongly believes, is the worst enemy of his interests and his class ? What would a father think of his own children wilfully putting poison in his food ? And yet this is the feeling that many farmers have about their men voting Radical. One of the best-hearted, most kindly and most liberal and successful farmers that I know gave up his business, as he told me, almost entirely on. account of this feeling; and it has rankled deep in my own mind and, I fear, made me feel far less kindly to the men than I used to feel.
Anyhow, there are parishes notorious for their political virulence from which I would not hire a labourer willingly, and though I should be the last man to use any influence I may have towards a labourer about his vote, no one can blame me if I try to select the men with whom I have to live and work from those who do believe that what is good for me is good for them also; and from those who do not bring up their children to think
