278 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



Such treatment in course of time naturally brought about 

 its own revenge. The agricultural labourer could not stand 

 up against it and stand out for better treatment. He had 

 not sufficiently heavy guns for that. But he could run 

 away from his profitless treadmill. And he did. Villages 

 became depopulated, hands scarce. There was " wealth 

 for honest labour," as the poet Thomson has it, elsewhere. 

 Employers in their unwisdom aggravated the evil, binding 

 thereby a scourge for their own back. Wages had all along 

 been poor. It seemed, as Mr. A. D. Hall has explained 

 it, a point of honour with the farmers as a class to keep 

 them so. The wages bill is an ugly item in any business 

 account. When, as a natural consequence of resistance to 

 a fair demand, the road to better things — be it in town 

 factories, be it on the land in Colonies, which had been mean- 

 while discovered — the ranks of labour began to " thin " — 

 the best men, as being the men best fitted for other work, being 

 of course the first to go — the shrewder among farmers 

 discerned the coming danger and showed themselves willing 

 in self-defence to guard against it, doing some justice, at any 

 rate in the matter of wages, to the men who were literally 

 their " hands," the instruments wherewith to carry on their 

 business. They admitted, says Mr. A, D. Hall, that con- 

 ditions " would allow of increased wages." However, 

 " there has always existed a strong personal feeling and even 

 a certain amount of social pressure on the side of the main- 

 tenance of the local standard rate of wages, until the farmer 

 felt it almost a duty to his fellows to let a discontented 

 man go rather than meet his demand for higher pay." The 

 time of depression came. And not only did agricultural 

 employers in their blindness contentedly permit " hands " 

 to leave them and their old occupation without any attempt 

 to stop the current, but they actually bundled them off, 

 as the Egyptians at the critical moment did the Israelites 

 — but without pressing gifts upon them— deliberately dis- 

 continuing tillage so as to attain the one great end of cutting 

 down the labour bill. The penny so saved proved anything 

 but the proverbial " penny got." However, that was a 

 revelation reserved for the future. For the moment things 



