STIRRINGS OF NEW LIFE. 173 



one might have imagined the Act to have been framed by 

 Samuel Butler or Mr. G. B. Shaw impishly imposing a 

 penalty on the poor for their folly of saving. 



Few village Hampdens dared to insist upon more cottages 

 and more land whilst cottages were scarce, since almost half 

 the labourers in England were living in farm- tied cottages, 1 

 and the raising of a voice for better conditions inevitably 

 meant exile from their village. Foiled right and left in any 

 attempt to improve their lot in life the younger generation 

 set its face steadily towards the town, some of them under 

 a vow to their parents never to become farm labourers. 



It began to be foreshadowed that any improvement 

 in the conditions of village life must be made by some 

 central authority, with the appointment of a large number 

 of Commissioners, both for the acquisition of land and the 

 building of houses. 



The House of Commons rather than the local council, 

 seemed to be the arena where the battle for the emancipation 

 of the labourer from chronic poverty would have to be 

 fought. The minimum wage began to be seriously dis- 

 cussed in the House. Mr. John Burns insisted that few 

 cottages could be built and let at an economic rent unless 

 labourers were paid a living wage. Mr. Lloyd George was 

 agitating the pockets of landowners by his famous Budget 

 of 909. The land was to be re- valued ; there was to be 

 a new Domesday Book. He was at war with the House of 

 Lords. Soon, very soon, with his Budget of 1909 and his 

 National Insurance Scheme of 1911, he became the most 

 hated man in England, by those who had many possessions. 



In 1909 one of the members of the new Union in Norfolk, 

 Mr. T. G. Higdon, paid a visit to the veteran Joseph Arch, 

 now eighty-three years of age and living in retirement in 

 his old cottage at Barford. The agricultural labourers' 

 movement owed a great deal to the fact that Arch possessed 

 a cottage of his own. Had he rented one, it is probable that 

 he would never have been allowed to do his work. He had 

 married again, this time the daughter of a Norfolk farmer, 



1 Vide, The Land Enquiry. 



