hand to her side. She has a heart complaint. And yet she has t been regularly in the fields, bringing up a family at the same time, V working sometimes as many as fourteen hours on a stretch. But all she says is, "that she must if they would get bread;" nevertheless she adds, "this fieldwork ruins many a woman's constitution." You ask her about the children. It is a common tale, the natural result—she has lost four out of seven.
And thus the lives of men, women, and children are as really sacrificed now as ever they were in old heathen times, not certainly to appease some cruel deity, but in order that England may produce a highly-bred race of men and women, living a life so perfect in all its conditions of happiness as to excite the envy and the admiration of the world.
Much may doubtless be said on the question of cottages being built as farm buildings, to be used by the tenant's own labourers, and his alone; but in the Duke's manifesto, the reason avowed for putting both cottages and allotment-grounds into the hands of the farmers is The attitude of the labourers in forming a Union. Moreover, these cottages are mainly in villages, so that the result is to place one class of the community directly under the control of another. This is still more shown in the determination to take away the allotment-grounds, since it proves that it is considered unwise to allow the labourer to feel, even in the smallest degree, independent of his employer. As there are 914 allotments, the greater proportion of which are forty poles each in extent, and 360 cottages on the Duke's estates in Oxfordshire, it will be seen how numerous are the persons likely to be affected by the manifesto.
And this brings me to speak of the cottages themselves as the second item in the grounds of discontent which an intelligent and religious labourer may righteously feel as he contemplates his condition.
Not that I mean to say that the cottages in this district are worse than elsewhere, or perhaps so bad as I have seen them in some parts, nevertheless such is the condition of numbers in the Woodstock Union, that the Medical Officer of Health ascribes the unhealthiness of the people to the two causes of low wages and the unwholesomeness of many of the cottages.
