228 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



Lord Lilford, who employed them and owned their cottages. 



It was a conflict between the pride of the peasant and the 

 pride of the peer ; and the pride of the peasant was nobler ; 

 for it was less personal, being instinct with race : the fight 

 for the freedom of all Englishmen ; whilst the other was 

 coloured with the baser passion of repression of Liberty. 



Hitherto, at any rate since Queen Victoria mounted the 

 throne, our landed aristocracy, displaying the English 

 characteristic for compromise, had kept out of any violent 

 collision with their labourers. Thus by never challenging 

 the landless to action they had made themselves the strong- 

 est aristocracy in the world. They had left it to their ten- 

 ants to squeeze rents out of the bones of the labourers. 

 But they, the lords of the soil, had always held themselves 

 like a squadron of cavalry in reserve at the base in reserve 

 for the farmers. Petulantly, and somewhat ingloriously, 

 one or two of the undisciplined of the booted and spurred 

 had sounded a faint note of challenge from the horn in 

 their backwoods in 1874 and again in 1909. 



Now, for the first time, a noble peer was courageously 

 heard to sound the horn, and it was on the hunting field 

 amongst his mounted companions that he gave full cry. 

 Every Union man was to be hunted like a fox from his hole 

 of a cottage. Northamptonshire was to be purged of 

 vermin. 



Northamptonshire had stood foremost amongst the coun- 

 ties of England which had robbed the peasantry of common 

 land, and it was equally noted for the payment of low 

 wages. 



The N.A.L.U. had been at work in the district of Thrap- 

 stone in 1913, and sixty farm workers on Lord Lilford's 

 estate had joined the Union. In April, 1914, the men 

 asked that their wages should be raised from 145. to i6s. 

 a week and that they should enjoy a weekly half-holiday. 

 They asked for the " King's Pay and the King's Conditions." 

 Lord Lilford agreed to give his men the much needed rise 

 of is. a week, but refused the Saturday half-holiday, and 

 the rise of the shilling a week was on the condition that the 

 men should be disloyal to their Union. As each labourer 



