178 THE AGRICULTURAL CLUB. 



were published by Sir Frederick Eden, Arthur Young, and others. 

 They nearly all show a constant deficit. This had puzzled many 

 people both in modern and in earlier times, and various supposi- 

 tions have been put forward to account for it. The most popular 

 among the contemporary writers was that the labourer stole the 

 residue ; among the sentimental writers of to-day it is ascribed 

 to charity. I have very little doubt that it was honestly earned, 

 and though it is generally held that these farm labourers lived in 

 a state of the direst poverty, constantly underfed and with no 

 prospect before them but an old age in the workhouse and a 

 pauper's grave, I believe this estimate to be inexact, and that 

 while there was much hardship and little hope of anything 

 better, there was little real misery or starvation till economic 

 conditions were upset by the wars with France. If the labourer 

 was badly paid he was seldom out of work and so deprived of all 

 means of subsistence. He might be ill-fed, but he never starved. 

 He was of the country, and the country was of him. One could 

 not exist without the other, and he survived so long'as Agriculture 

 existed. Even when prices rose he was not so severely affected 

 as the town worker, and though the influence of the Spenhamland 

 Act was bad and the principle unsound, it is known that some 

 labourers managed to save considerable sums out of the doles 

 that were given them. On the whole, it was, I believe, a peaceful 

 primitive existence so long as external conditions remained 

 constant. 



If this is a true picture of the agricultural labourer of the 

 eighteenth century in England, how does it compare with the 

 analogous class elsewhere ? The answer, I believe, is that all 

 fared much alike. Life in Scotland was a little harder. Hours 

 were longer, for some of the farm servants rose even earlier than 

 their English fellows, and worked in summer at any rate 

 more hours. The standard of comfort was lower, food was 

 harder to get and of a coarser kind. Feudal customs lasted in 

 some places, and there was perhaps less personal liberty. Much 

 the same conditions ruled in Ireland, except that the feudal 

 system never really took root in that island. But serfdom, 

 the last traces of which had long before disappeared in Great 

 Britain, still lingered in France till they were violently destroyed 

 at the Revolution, though the economic conditions remained. 

 In Scandinavia, Russia and in the greater part of Germany it 

 survived in its primitive vigour, and the farm workers of those 

 countries as described in Marshall's Tour in Russia, were simply 

 the slaves of their masters. They were born cultivators of the 

 soil and they scarcely knew whether they were working for their 

 masters or for themselves. In this respect, at any rate, the 

 English farm worker was in a better position than any of his 

 fellows elsewhere, for undoubtedly some, though not many, 



