THE FARMER SWINGS HIS SCYTHE. 59 



gates " would be opened if labourers began to combine and 

 demand higher wages. They saw in Arch's mild proposals 

 for allotments, communal appropriation of the land and 

 possibly a repetition of the French Revolution. 



It is not surprising. that the farmers defeated the labourers. 

 Threatened with eviction from their farm-tied cottages ; 

 threatened with the loss of both public and private charities 

 by the class which governed them ; voteless, isolated ; 

 for the most part unable to read or write, and with the air 

 full of rumours of appropriation of union funds sedulously 

 circulated by their enemies, the miracle would have been if 

 the men had won. 



It was continually being dinned into the men's ears by 

 their employers and the clergy that the organisers were 

 living in the lap of luxury on the subscriptions collected 

 in the towns. When one realises that the majority of 

 men could not sign their names, and that money used to 

 arrive at a locked-out village in a bag from which relief 

 was dispensed to men who could only put a cross for their 

 names, the marvel would have been if there had been no 

 discrepancies in cash accounts. Ball said at Newmarket 

 he believed that 90 per cent, of the men were in debt and that 

 80 per cent, could not write their names. 



Though the men did lose their battle, the financial result 

 of the struggle was that the labourers in all the eastern and 

 southern and midland counties came through the fiery 

 ordeal with a higher weekly wage to take every Saturday 

 night. That is to say, the low level of 125. had been raised 

 to 133. or 145., and in Norfolk to 155., as far as the eastern 

 counties were concerned, and in all the other counties a 

 rise was perceptible in 1874-5. 



Mr. Thomas F. Plowman, a farmers' advocate, writes in 

 his Fifty Years of a Showman's Life : 



" Although wages had from 1850 onwards gradually advanced, 

 it must be admitted that they had not kept pace with the rising 

 prices, and herein must be found some justification for the effort 

 made to redress the balance. But there was less justification 

 for the methods employed to this end. No distinction was 

 drawn between the good and the bad master, and the most 

 violent and incendiary language was used of all alike. . . . The 



