blazing with gorgeous hollyhocks, and often well stocked with fruit-trees, seem at first sight to leave little to be desired.
But look deeper. Talk with the peasantry, and you will find discontent everywhere. Not a grumbling, unreasonable discontent, but a deep sense that things are very far from what they should be.
In his now famous manifesto to his tenantry, the Duke recognises this state of things, and attributes it to agitators and declaimers. No doubt the Union propaganda has done a good deal to produce the present outspoken expression of feeling, but would it have had the amount of influence it has had if it had not found the soil prepared, the seed sown, and the crop itself ready to be gathered in? What the Union chiefly has done has been to help the general discontent to express itself, and to bring about such a mutual understanding as should enable it to do so with some hope of removing the causes.
No one could read Mr George Culley's most favourable report of the condition of Oxfordshire labourers, given in the "Agricultural Commissioner's Blue-book of 1869," and suppose for one instant that the labourers themselves could be contented with it, or that they would not be more and more discontented as they became thoroughly alive to its evils.
What were the labourers' wages in the Woodstock district lately—that is, before the Union movement commenced? Ten shillings a week! At harvest time, with the help of his wife and children, he could make four or five times as much, but it only lasted two or three weeks, and he had to work from early dawn to sunset.
Mr Culley, in his report, gives the following statement, as made to him by a labourer's wife at Combe, a pretty village close by Blenheim, and where some some of the Duke's labourers live.
"My husband is a farm labourer; he has ten shillings a week if they make all time; sometimes he loses a day or two from wet, and they take it off. I can't say what my husband gets in piece work; in harvest, if I help him with a little boy, we can cut and tie an acre a day, and we got nine shillings an acre last har vest; the crops was light, the rabbits had eat so much, you
