THE AFTERMATH OF THISTLES. 89 



Emigration, though, had gone out of fashion, at any rate 

 amongst the men of Norfolk. It began to be considered 

 derogatory to be an exile. The strong young men went 

 navvying, or into the Police Force, or on to the railway lines, 

 or into the mines. The grown up young men and daughters 

 left the countryside the youths for the towns and the girls 

 for domestic service. Few cottages seem to have had more 

 than two bedrooms : the exodus was inevitable for those 

 intending marriage. 



" I could point," says Dr. Jessopp, " to three disgraceful 

 tenements immediately contiguous to one another, in each of 

 which, by a strange coincidence, there were lately a father, a 

 mother, and seven children all sleeping in a single bedroom. 

 In one case the mother produced an eighth child in the night, her 

 only helper being her daughter, a girl of fourteen, who did her 

 best while the father ran to fetch the midwife. 



" The plain, ugly fact is patent to all who do not resolutely 

 keep their eyes shut, that the agricultural labourer's life has had 

 all the joy taken out of it, and has become as dull and sodden a 

 life as a man's can well be made." x 



" The poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex like swine." 



Then, as now, it was quite common for labourers to 

 walk two or three miles to their daily work. 



" Think of the waste," wrote Dr. Jessopp, " of energy, of 

 muscular tissue, of nerve force, of actual time taken out of what 

 the employer bargains for, or the employed has to give. Think 

 of the weary shambling through the mud, and rain, and blinding 

 sleet and snow, of the wet clothes and the soaked dinner in the 

 basket and the dreary pounding back at night in the dark, to 

 find the baby sick and the doctor having to be fetched, and the 

 roof overhead letting in the steady drip, drip, drip, when the 

 poor sleeper lays himself down at last." 2 



He considered that the tramp who sought his bed in a 

 barn on a bundle of straw had the selection of a better 

 bedroom as a rule than the overcrowded labourers ! 



Arcady was not all like this. It had its Mayfair and Bel- 

 gravia as well as its Bermondsey and its Whitechapel, and 

 the best cottages were generally those found on the estates 



1 Arcadv, by Augustus Jessopp. 2 Ibid 



