56 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



Commissioners, laid before the government, that the system is 

 one of oppression, cruelty, and plunder, and in every respect 

 leading to gross immoralities. The distance to which these 

 laborers go is often as much as five or six miles, and this usually 

 on foot, and to return at night. Children and girls are compelled 

 to go these distances, and consequently must rise very early in 

 the morning and reach home at a very late hour at night. Girls 

 and boys and young men and women work indiscriminately 

 together. When the distance to which they go for work is ten 

 miles, they are sent in carts. When the distances are great, 

 they occasionally pass the night at the place of work, and then 

 lodge in barns, or any where else, indiscriminately together. To 

 talk of morals in such a case is idle. One of the gang-masters, 

 who has been an overseer seventeen years, gives it as his testi 

 mony, under oath, &quot; that seventy out of a hundred of the girls 

 become prostitutes,&quot; and the general account given of the opera 

 tions of the system shows an utter profligacy of mind in their 

 general conversation and manners, when morals must follow of 

 course. If they go in the morning and stay only a little while, 

 on account of rain, or other good cause, they are paid nothing. 

 The day is divided into quarters, but no smaller fractions of 

 time are in any case allowed to them. Then the persons em 

 ployed are required, in many cases, to deal with the gang-master 

 for the supplies they receive, in payment for their labor. The 

 results of such a system are obvious. The work being taken by 

 the piece, the gang-master presses them to their utmost strength. 

 The fragments of days, in which work is done and not paid for 

 to the laborers, are all to the benefit of the gang-master, who, 

 in such case, gets a large amount of work done at no cost. 

 These poor wretches, being unable to contract for themselves, or 

 to get any work but through him, he of course determines the 

 price of the labor, and, one may be sure, puts it down to the 

 lowest point. But his advantages do not end here, for there is 

 no doubt that he gets a high advance upon the goods which he 

 requires them to purchase of him, and thus their wages are 

 reduced still lower. No just or benevolent mind, it would seem, 

 can look upon any such system in all its details, as given in the 

 Commissioners Report, but with a profound sense of its injus 

 tice, oppression, and immorality. 



One of the gang-masters says, &quot; If they go to work two hours 



