52 Large and Small Holdings 



continued alongside of the official efforts. The Labourers' Friend 

 Society was founded in the thirties, its object being to carry on, both 

 by lectures and publications, a propaganda in favour of allotments 1 ; 

 or, as it claimed, to abolish the evils entailed on labourers and small 

 farmers by the high corn-prices and the consequent enclosures and 

 engrossing 2 . But energetically as the agitation was carried on 8 , it 

 could not accomplish economic impossibilities. Even at the present 

 day, when the formation of allotments is often to the economic 

 advantage of the landowner, the ingrained conservatism of the land- 

 lord and his larger tenants frequently prevents their introduction. 

 Such opposition was naturally much more powerful at a time when 

 the allotment had indeed many social gains to offer, but practically no 

 economic advantage. 



Nowadays many farmers are in favour of allotments because they 

 rightly suppose that a holding of his own will tend to keep the 

 labourer upon the land. But in the corn-law period employers had 

 nothing to fear from a rural exodus. The very cause of the low 

 wages of agricultural labour was that the industrial crises and the 

 depression of trade made it impossible for the labourers to migrate to 

 the towns 4 . The rural labour-market was overflowing precisely 

 because the movement to the towns was at a standstill 8 . In the 

 thirties the farmers even regarded it as a blessing if labourers did 

 leave the land, since, far from forcing up wages in the still swamped 

 labour-market, such migration freed the country from beggars and 

 vagrants, and relieved the rates'. Farmers were not at that time 

 crying out for workers ; it was the starving labourers who begged for 

 work at any price. Under these circumstances there was naturally 



1 Proceedings of the Labourers' Friend Society ', 1832, pp. 7 f. 



2 Ibid., pp. 9 f. 



3 Cp. the many articles on the Allotment System published at this period ; e.g. in The 

 Farmers' Magazine, 1836 (July to December), p. 167 b. 



4 The Proceedings of the Labourers' Friend Society, loc. cit., state that the existing condition 

 of industry precluded all hope that the superfluous agricultural labourers would be absorbed 

 by the towns, since the industrial labour-market was already over-crowded. 



5 Cp. among other authorities Wilson Fox, Agricultural Wages during the last Fifty 

 Years, in Journal of 'the Royal Statistical Society, 1903, p. 311 : " Does any one want to go 

 back to the period between the ' twenties ' and the ' fifties,' when the rural population was so 

 plentiful in many counties outside the northern ones that there was not enough employment 

 to go round ? " 



6 The steward of the Duke of Bedford stated in 1836 that the farmers had been very 

 desirous that labourers should find work on the construction of the Birmingham railway. 

 No rise of wages had followed : the agricultural labour-market had only been freed from a 

 great over-supply of labour, and the poor-rates had been relieved. Report of 1836, qu. 1897 ff. 

 and qu. 9590 ff. 



