64 AN AGRICULTURAL FAGGOT. 



the countryman, ignorant, until he learns from experience, 

 of the much larger outlay required in the town to attain 

 the same standard of comfort. But the standard of 

 remuneration for labour is naturally less in the country 

 than in the town, on the principle which Adam Smith long 

 ago laid down that wages vary according to the agreeable- 

 ness or disagreeableness of the employment. Work in the 

 fields is, at any rate, more healthy, and one would think 

 more agreeable, than work in the factory, the workshop 

 or the streets. 



Life here (eloquently wrote the special commissioner of the 

 Daily News from Essex last August), as we drive along looks 

 so placid, so pleasant, so easy, that, by comparison, the life 

 of those who are crowding our dock gates, or are pent up in 

 gas factories, or slaving at our great railway stations, conduct- 

 ing omnibuses, tramping the dull streets at night as policemen, 

 or going through the drudgery of a city warehouse — such life 

 seems a sort of nightmare. . . . These Essex villagers have 

 fresh air, and flowers and fruit in their season. ... If their 

 wages are low, so are their expenses, and though they get none 

 of the excitements and stir of town life, they know nothing of 

 its struggle or strain either. 



If to these advantages in favour of the country it were 

 possible — as in the nature of things it cannot be possible 

 — to add equal pecuniary prospects, we might expect a 

 depopulation of the towns. 



I cannot attempt to dwell on the large subject comprised 

 in the word " wages." It was exhaustively treated three 

 years ago in a paper by Major Craigie, and the careful 

 figures then placed before the Farmers' Club remain sub- 

 stantially unaltered now. Tracing the range of farm 

 wages over a period of some twenty years, Major Craigie 

 summed up the result as follows : — 



In the East (of England) the entire rise since i860 in the 

 mean wage of an ordinary labourer has disappeared, and the 

 mean rate is little, if at all, over ns. In the belt of thirteen 

 counties surrounding the immediate home of wheat-growing 

 on the West and South, and approaching it in arable character, 

 the process has been exactly similar, but the level from which 

 the start was made and to which wages have now returned was 



