alive. Seven, eight, or at the highest nine or ten shillings a week, when the quartern loaf averaged eighteenpence, simply meant wholesale murder. But the screw was put on gradually, and in a few years, when bread had fallen to 11½d. the quartern loaf, there were places, Northamptonshire for example, where the magistrates fixed the parish allowance at 5s. a single man, 6s. a man and wife, and 2s. each child, whatever the family earned to be deducted from the allowance.
As 14s. or 15s. was the least a single man could live upon when bread was still cheaper, it is manifest that the wages which have been given to the Agricultural Labourer during the greater part of this century—7s., 8s. or the utmost 9s. or 10s. have meant starvation during the lifetime of at least one generation and a portion of two others. For be it remembered that on these miserable sums not one person, but very frequently four or five have had to live. It was only done by reducing the quantity of bread, bacon and beer, and taking in their place gruel, potatoes, suet and rice puddings, with decoctions of washed-out tea leaves. But even such fare was hardly possible under the varying prices which obtained during the Protective system. An old man told me that he remembered the time when the bread they had to eat was almost black, and so hard that they had to chop it. At such times, and perhaps many others, parents were glad on dark winter afternoons to fill their children's stomachs with a fluid made of hot water and coarse brown sugar, flavoured with a modicum of milk, and putting them to bed, get rid of their cries for food until the next morning. "No wonder," as Cobbett said to one of his labourers, "no wonder that you are all as thin as owlets, and that that son of yours there, who is nineteen years old, and is five feet nine inches high, is as you told me last summer, 'too weakly to do a man's work.' No wonder that his knees bend under him, and that he has a voice like that of a girl, instead of being able to carry a sack of wheat and jump a five-barred gate."
In Warwickshire I met two infirm men crawling like beetles along the road. After some conversation the elder of the two told me that he had brought eight children into the world and had buried five. What they died of he could hardly tell. Decline, one died of that, he knew—they called it "consumpted decline." Phthisis and
