274 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND. 



also to the employer — that is, the farmer — 

 being given the opportunity to exercise any 

 amount of petty tyranny. " Wages may be 

 low, perhaps only 12s. a week, but there is 

 the extra money for harvest, and I give him 

 a cottage, or let him one for Is. 6d. or 2s. a 

 week ; and so he is well off." This is the 

 contention of the farmer. 



In my opinion, the letting of cottages by 

 farmers to their own employees should be 

 penalised and considered an infringement of 

 the Truck Act. No landlord of a farm should 

 be allowed to delegate to the farmer the 

 letting of the cottages on the farm. 



Townsmen should remember that they 

 enjoy comparative freedom in town compared 

 to the agricultural labourer in the country. 

 The town workman may never see his em- 

 ployers, or know who they are beyond their 

 names or the names of the company for whom 

 he is working. He has little fear of running 

 up against them in the street or of having to 

 live under a roof owned by his employers. In 

 the country the labourer meets his farmer- 

 employer nearly every day in the fields or in 

 the lanes, and he feels that if he offends the 

 master, or the master's friends, he may lose not 



