PEASANT REVOLTS 173 



existed between the employers and the employed." 

 These statements are no doubt true, but their real 

 meaning is that the labourers were no longer willing 

 to submit to the hard and miserable conditions which 

 employers sought to impose upon them. One result 

 of the movement was that migration, with and without 

 the assistance of the Union, rapidly increased.^ 



The transactions connected with the Agricultural 

 Labourers' Union illustrate the thoroughness with 

 which the old peasantry had — by our land system — 

 been reduced to a servile caste. 



The changes in the ranks of the contending parties in 

 the struggle of 1872 are worthy of notice. In previous 

 outbreaks the cultivators of the soil of all classes were 

 found in one camp, and the landlord class in the other. 

 In 1872 the labourer stood alone, and had arrayed 

 against him both landlord and farmer. The farmer 

 was no longer an independent yeoman cultivator. In 

 1872 he had no Compensation Act to protect him. 

 Practically all he put on the land was the landlord's, on 

 the "good understanding" with whom he was abso- 

 lutely dependent. He was but a yearly tenant, pay- 

 ing a competitive rent which was often so high that in 

 order to make a sufficient profit for himself he had to 

 keep his labour bill at a starvation rate. Hence his 

 resistance to what he called the "excessive demands" 

 of the labourer. In these circumstances it is absurd to 

 affect surprise that the agricultural labourer fled from 

 a system in which — though the real cultivator of the 

 soil — he was but an outcast. Accordingly, during the 

 three decades of years (1871-1901) nearly 400,000 



1 The funds of the Union were spent, to a considerable extent, in 

 assisting labourers to migrate. In one day alone (24 June, 1872) forty 

 agricultural labourers, with their wives and families, were sent from South 

 Wales to take situations provided for them in the north. 



