88 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



for what appeared to him political unrealities, and his enthu- 

 siasm for Gladstonian candidates distinctly cooled. 



Had Arch stuck to his " last," as in the early days of the 

 Union he declared he was determined to do, when politicians 

 tried to lure him to follow will-o'-the-wisp reforms, he would 

 not have suffered defeat a second time, and his Union, in my 

 opinion, would have had a longer run of prosperity. 



" No, thank you," he said to the political reformers in 1872. 

 "I'm for reform as much as anybody, but it's got to be the 

 labourer first, and reform all round after. . . . It's a poor shoe- 

 maker that can't stick to his last. Well, to raise the wages, 

 shorten the hours, and make a free man out of a slave is my last, 

 and to that last I'll stick as tight as beeswax for the present. 

 Raise a man's material condition to the level of self-respecting 

 decency, and the moral will rise, too." l 



Thus spoke the shrewd English peasant before his head 

 was slightly turned by the great politicians at Westminster ; 

 and in speaking thus he spoke almost the same words as his 

 great predecessor, Cobbett, who said : " I will allow nothing 

 to be good with regard to the labouring classes unless it 

 makes an addition to the victuals, drink, or clothing. As 

 to their minds, that is much too sublime a matter for me to 

 think about." 



Dr. Jessopp attributed rural depopulation to the shameful 

 housing conditions. No less than 92,250 labourers in 

 Great Britain had left the land between 1871 and i88i. 2 



" Men do not run away in shoals," he pertinently remarked, 

 " from homes where their childhood was happy. . . . They do 

 run away from the odious thought of living and dying in a 

 squalid hovel with a clay floor and two dark cabins under the 

 rafters reached by a ricketty ladder, in the one of which sleep 

 father and mother as best they can, while in the foetid air of the 

 other their offspring of both sexes huddle, sometimes eight or 

 nine of them, among them young men and young women out 

 of whom you are stamping all sense of shame. Yes, people do 

 run away from a life like this ; leaving it behind them as a 

 dreadful past which they remember only with indignation or 

 rebelling against the prospect of it as a future too hideous to be 

 entertained except with scorn. I, for one, do not blame them." 3 



1 Joseph Arch : The Story of his Life Told by Himself. 

 1 Census of England and Wales, General Report, 1883. 

 ' A cady, by Augustus Jessopp. 



