The Moral of this Narrative. 533 



much success by the Labour candidate of to-day, as it was by 

 the Manchester school some fifty years ago. 



In discussing the circumstances of the third and more 

 numerous party connected with the soil, it behoves us to speak 

 gently, even tenderly of its efforts to remain independent. 

 The labourer is, so to speak, but a day's work in advance of 

 want, his cottage door but a short distance off that of the 

 workhouse, his powers to keep off the wolf solely dependent on 

 health and good conduct. "We cannot therefore blame him if, 

 in his uneducated intelligence, he catches at any straw which 

 may save him from sinking in this struggle for existence. 



It may, however, be permitted for us to wonder whether 

 he has not bought his present complete independence some- 

 what too dearly, whether as a class he would not be more 

 uniformly comfortable were he less a free agent than he has 

 now become. " Independence," says Sir Frederick Eden, 

 " affords the Free-will, which enables a man to sink into 

 degradation or rise to opulence." As compared with its reverse 

 (to which we need not attach a specific name), this same writer 

 applies Dr. Johnson's contrast between marriage and celibacy, 

 "the one as consisting of many pains, the other of no pleasures." 

 A friend of Eden's once told him that where, as in Arabia, 

 every one who was not a master was a slave, the relationship 

 between the two classes was more cordial and less subject to 

 perpetual wrangling than where services are bought and sold 

 with money. No right-minded person wishes, however, to 

 see the servitude of the Jus Feiidale re-established ; much less 

 would he desire to convert the rural labourer into the abject 

 creature which the Speenhamland Act made him. But is 

 there no method of combining the cordial relationship of a 

 servile economy with the independence enjoyed by the free- 

 agent ? We think there is, and even in preference to a sliding- 

 scale system of wages, would rejoice as much for the labourer's 

 own sake as for that of the whole Landed Interest, to see a 

 return to those times when, lodged in the house of his em- 

 plo^^er, the two worked, eat, and slept in close proximity. We 

 would greatly amend, if not entirely repeal the Truck Acts, of 

 1831 and 1887. AVe would aboHsh once more the fixed weekly 



