40 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



returned. The farmer would under no circumstances invite the 

 laborer to his table, or visit him as a friend or neighbor. I do 

 not mean to imply that there is, on the part of the higher classes 

 of society in England, any insolence or arrogance in their treat 

 ment of their inferiors. Free as my intercourse has been with 

 the highest and the middle classes, I have seen no instance of 

 this, nor any thing approaching it, but the contrary ; and the 

 best bred men in the country the true gentlemen are dis 

 tinguished by their courtesy and the absence of all ostentatious 

 pretensions. While they naturally fall into the orbit, in which 

 birth, education, and the political institutions of the country 

 have accustomed them to revolve, the well-principled among 

 them would, I am sure, be the last persons, by any assumptions, 

 voluntarily to mortify one below them with a sense of his 

 inferiority. 



The farm laborers are, I will not say in a degraded condition, 

 for that would not, in any sense, apply to them, unless where, 

 by their own bad habits, they may have degraded themselves ; 

 but they are in a very low condition, and extremely ignorant and 

 servile. They rarely, as with us, live in the house of their 

 employers, but either in cottages on the farm or in a neighboring 

 village. They are, usually, comfortably clad, in this respect 

 contrasting most favorably with the mechanics and manufac 

 turers in the cities and large towns ; but they are, in general, 

 very poorly fed. Their wages, compared with the wages of 

 labor in the United States, are very low. The cash wages paid 

 to them seldom equals the cash wages paid to laborers with us, 

 and our laborers, in addition to their wages in money, have their 

 board ; but the English laborers are obliged to subsist themselves, 

 with an .occasional allowance, in some instances, of beer, in hay 

 ing or harvesting. The division of labor among them is quite 

 particular a ploughman being always a ploughman, and almost 

 inseparable from his horses ; a ditcher, a ditcher ; a shepherd, a 

 shepherd only ; the consequence of this is that what they do, 

 they do extremely well. Their ploughing, sowing, drilling, and 

 ditching or draining, are executed with an admirable neatness 

 and exactness ; indeed, the lines of their work could not be more 

 true and straight than they usually are, if they were measured 

 with a marked scale, inch by inch. They speak of ploughing 

 and drilling or ridging by the inch or the half inch ; and the 

 width of the furrow slice, or the depth of the furrow, or the dis- 



