368 LAND REFORM 



much ignorance we meet with among their betters. 

 ... I assure you I never saw more distress among 

 this class. They are generally employed, but their 

 wages here never exceed twelve shillings a week, and 

 are often ten. The labourer's wife and three or four 

 children live upon this sum, with bread at 2-Jd. per 

 pound ; dry bread is all they can get. The pigs have 

 disappeared from the sties. They and their children 

 are looking haggard and pale and ragged ; and this is 

 agricultural prosperity." (Morley's " Life of Cobden.") 



If we take the state of things ten years later than 

 when Cobden wrote — twenty years after free im- 

 ports — we find the condition of the labourers, if any- 

 thing, still more deplorable. The reader must study 

 the numerous volumes which contain the reports and 

 evidence of the several Royal Commissions, to know 

 the almost incredible hardships which the rural labour- 

 ers were suffering. They seem to have reached the 

 depths of misery. ** Children must work because the 

 poor people could not get along without it. . . . It 

 was the children that kept the wolf from the door. 

 . . . Gangers supplied children (often as young as six 

 or seven) to farmers at 14s. per score, paying them 4d. 

 to 7d. per day," etc. 



Mr. Fraser (afterwards Bishop of Manchester), one 

 of the sub-commissioners, describing the social con- 

 dition, dwellings, etc., of the labourers, says : " It is a 

 hideous picture, and the picture is drawn from real 

 life. It is impossible," he adds, "to exaggerate the 

 ill effects of the state of things in every respect, physi- 

 cal, social, and moral. "^ 



* " Royal Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in 

 Agriculture, 1867" (First Report, 1868). See also "Children's Employ- 

 ment Commission, 1862" (Sixth Report, 1867). 



