ON THE PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. 693 



for it is very rarely the case that an agricultural labourer can 

 rent a cottage, even though it has not a scrap of garden-ground, 

 at less than is. ^d. a week, and very often he has to pay is. 

 But it is quite certain that the average wages of agricultural 

 labourers are not in excess of 12*. a week. Among the secon- 

 dary necessaries of life the price of meat has nearly trebled, 

 while the wages of labour have sustained a far less increase. Of 

 course, when the condition of the modern labourer is contrasted 

 with that of his ancestor 500 years ago, the deterioration is 

 still more striking. 



Some of the causes which have led to these results are to be 

 found in the working of the Poor-law, especially tha.t law which 

 existed before the changes of 1836. Whatever may be said 

 of the beneficence of those provisions which give all men a 

 legal right to relief from destitution, there cannot, I think, be 

 a doubt that the certainty of this provision has diminished 

 prudential motives among the agricultural peasantry, and 

 checked all spirit of enterprise. But still more serious is the 

 fact, that alone among industrial avocations the occupation of 

 an agricultural labourer holds out no hope. An artisan may 

 rise to be a master, a mechanic to be an engineer, a factory 

 operative to be a capitalist. But no English agricultural 

 labourer, in his most sanguine dreams, has the vista of occupy- 

 ing, still less of possessing, land. He cannot rise in his calling. 

 He cannot cherish any ambition, and he is in consequence 

 dull and brutish, reckless and supine. 



We owe the fact that the great English nation is tenant at 

 will to a few thousand landowners, to that device of evil times, 

 a strict settlement. We are informed that the machinery 

 which has gradually changed the whole character of the rural 

 population of England was invented by the subtlety of two 

 lawyers of the Restoration, Palmer and Bridgman. As there 

 have been men whose genius has bestowed lasting benefit on 

 mankind, so there have been from time to -time exhibitions 

 of perverted intellectual activity, whose malignant influence 

 has inflicted permanent evils. It may be that the mischief 



