84 RIGHTS OF THE POOR. 



the land has been turned into large farms, and is now cultivater by 

 labourers without hardly a single garden amongst them. Is the 

 moral and social character of the people improved by the change ? 

 Then, Sunday after Sunday, the small primitive-looking church was 

 crowded with decently clad and attentive hearer?. Then the master 

 and his men mingled occasionally together, and offices of kindness 

 and good will were continually interchanged between them. Then 

 father, mother, son and daughter were seen either at work in the 

 same loom, or shop, or cultivating a well-ordered and productive gar- 

 den-plot, and exhibiting in their appearance and general deportment, 

 evidences of content, sobriety and industry. Now the same church 

 stands in its simple and primitive beauty, and provided with a pas- 

 tor fit to " point the way to heaven ;" but it is deserted by the 

 children of parents, who permitted nothing but the most grievous 

 sickness to detain them from its hallowed walls and where are 

 they ? Lounging in ragged heedlessness, lurking about beer-houses, 

 or listening to the furious raving of some political demagogue. Now, 

 the employer and the employed are in mutual hostility ; no decent 

 respect or gratitude on the one hand, or kindly countenance and as- 

 sistance on the other. Now father, mother, son, and daughter are 

 no longer denizens under the same roof, and the once neat and well- 

 cultivated garden-plot, is either run to waste, its fences ragged and 

 broken, and producing little beyond nettles and gooseberries, or not a 

 vestige remains of it and now their deportment and general appear- 

 ance indicate discontent and discomfort. Then parochial relief was 

 administered with a kindly hand, as between neighbour and neigh- 

 bouras it was never asked for but in the extremest exigences. 

 Now poor-rates are more than quintupled, and though doled out with' 

 rigour, and with every circumstance of degradation and humiliation, 

 relief is clamorously and insolently demanded to supply the place 

 of wage, and to the ruin of every feeling of self respect Well 

 may we say, " Look on this picture and on that !" Who is it that 

 would not pray to see the cottage-homes, and the cottage-gardens 

 of England what they once were ? To hear again the voice 

 of her peasantry in glad jubilee and in place of midnight burnings 

 and dastardly outrage, to find confidence and good-will restored. 

 These are objects aimed at by the Labourers' Friend Society. 



By those who have paid no attention to the subject, it will be 

 asked is labour thus expended on land, at a fair farmer's rent, pro- 

 fitable to the labourer ? The answer is highly so. The produce 

 of spade husbandry seems hardly to have a limit, and a cottager with 

 thirty poles of land, or even considerably less, will be able to keep a 

 pig, supply his family with vegetables, and lay up a winter-store of 

 potatoes, besides paying his rent, and all this without interfering 

 with his daily labour, as the heavier part of the work only requires 

 his attention, his family being perfectly competent to manage all the 

 rest of the operations. 



It was truly remarked by one of the commissioners of poor-laws 

 in his report, that " where a labourer was possessed of a small por- 

 tion of land, sufficient and not more than sufficient to occupy his leisure 

 time, and furnish his children with employment, I found a striking 



