AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS -- 407 



1888, though their conditions are still capable of improvement. 

 But their prosperity in 1912 is quite a different kind of prosperity 

 from that which they enjoyed in the simpler and more leisured 

 eighteenth century. Up to that time, the picture, drawn in the 

 first chapter, of Hfe in the self-supporting village still held true in 

 many essential features. In remote rural districts, changes were 

 slow and few. Suddenly, from 1760 onwards, over the whole 

 of society swept the great industrial expansion. Domestic handi- 

 craftsmen and small farmers alike were overwhelmed : industry, 

 both manufacturing and agricultural, was reorganised on the new 

 commercial Hnes which seemed best adapted for the greatest possible 

 production at the least possible cost. The completion of the work of 

 enclosure destroyed the inherited traditions of the peasantry, their 

 ideals, their customs, their habits, their ancestral solutions of the 

 problems of life, — all, in fact, that made up the native home-bred 

 civihsation of rural England. With the disappearance of the primi- 

 tive framework of village life, vanished — for a time at any rate — 

 many of the virtues of the class, their independence, pride, frugahty, 

 self-control. It is not surprising that for at least half a century they 

 should have remained stupefied by the shock, gradually reahsing 

 the full meaning of the change, and then either stoHdly acquiescmg 

 in their new existence, or impatient to escape on the first opportunity. 

 Without a return to an extinct social and industrial system, the old 

 conditions cannot be entirely rebuilt for them any more than they 

 can be for other classes. The most that can be done is to revive as 

 far as possible the best features of a form of life which has passed 

 away and cannot be completely restored. 



From 1815, the moral, social, and probably the material, position 

 of the agricultural labourer rapidly dechned. He became more and 

 more exclusively dependent on money wages, ^ and these, though 

 increased by pauper allowances, fell lower and lower every year 

 after the peace. The Poor Law of 1834 marks the starting-point in 

 the recovery. But the storj^ of the slow steps by which labourers 

 have cHmbed from the depths into which they had been plunged is 

 a chequered record. For more than thirty years, wages had been sup- 

 plemented from the rates, all the year round, whether the recipient 

 was employed or not. Men with famihes had received allow- 



' See Appendix X. for weeldy payments in cash. Calculations of agricultural 

 wages must always be used with the utmost caution, and merely as general 

 approximations to the facts. 



