74 THE AGRICULTURAL CLUB. 



and to give them some incentive to do so. He had asked, 

 "If there was some system by which lads could obtain a 

 certificate or diploma and become better than the average, 

 would you be prepared to pay them extra ? " The reply 

 was always the same, " The difficulty is that if you give one 

 lad more than another you upset all the others." Mr. 

 Nicholls said that in his opinion it was the farmer who would 

 be most upset. He got a bad time from his fellow farmers 

 if they discovered he was paying higher wages than they did. 



Sir Arthur Hazlerigg took up this point and remarked that 

 it was a very difficult thing to pay a skilled man more than 

 others. He had once agreed to pay some skilled men 35. 

 a week more than the others, but he would never try the 

 experiment again. He had only recently heard of a farmer 

 who would have willingly paid his horseman 35. a week more 

 but dared not do so because of the other men. 



The fact is that in this lies one of the fundamental diffi- 

 culties of dealing with agricultural wages. In the manifold 

 criticism of the policy and administration of the Agricultural 

 Wages Board an objection was very commonly made that 

 they had set up a " flat rate," and that under the minimum 

 wage system every man had to be paid the same whether 

 skilled or unskilled. There was just enough truth in the 

 allegation to make it plausible. It was true that any man 

 who was taken on, even temporarily, however unskilled or 

 incompetent, could claim to be paid the minimum wage if 

 he was physically and mentally sound. This defect in the 

 system arose from the inflexibility of a single section in the 

 Corn Production Act, which could have been amended in a 

 few words. To cite it as an argument against the principle 

 of a minimum wage obviously could only arise from con- 

 fusion of thought. As a matter of fact, however, the 

 accusation that the Agricultural Wages Board introduced 

 a " flat rate " was inaccurate. The minimum rates varied 

 both for age and skill in as great or even greater degree than 

 they had varied before the war. Agricultural wages from 

 time immemorial had been flat rates. Except for temporary 

 men and for men who were deficient mentally or physically 

 the rate of wages in a county or district had been uniform. 



