292 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



tion. Our agricultural labourer cannot, while things remain 

 as they are, escape from his bondage — except by abandon- 

 ing his home and deserting to some different occupation 

 abroad or at home, because his class is still as a general 

 rule dependent for its dwellings upon those to whom it has 

 to look for employment, cap in hand, not as a matter of 

 free bargaining but as a matter of almost necessity. 

 Employers may be fair and even kind enough, but up to 

 the present time they have utterly failed to grasp the 

 conditions of the man's case from his own point of view — 

 his legitimate desire to rise to something better, his just 

 title to such aspirations and, one might add, his common 

 humanity and his position as a political equal. 



Now let us for a moment imagine a state of things in 

 which the desiderata here suggested in outline have come 

 to be fulfilled. There stands the old farm with its broad 

 fields — no matter whether the occupier be one of " S. G. O." 's 

 fancied " squire-farmers " or a tenant still. Scattered round 

 it or near it are labourers' cottages, with their well-kept 

 gardens and their diminutive little fields yielding potatoes 

 and parsnips and similar produce. Those cottages are 

 rented or owned by their occupants in absolute independence 

 of the employer, who has no voice in their letting or selling, 

 and can give no tenant notice. No matter whether rented 

 or owned, the cottage is, for use, the labourer's own. He 

 may lay out care and pains upon it, to make it neat and 

 spruce, comfortable and cosy, so as to fix upon it the wife's 

 and children's affections. His children will grow up in 

 that little home — of which they know every corner, as 

 they do every bed of the garden, both of which they have 

 helped to make trim and attractive with grateful labour, 

 with the right results — and expect to see father and mother 

 one day sitting restfully by the cheery fireside — no longer 

 in the " house " — with memories crowding in upon them 

 suggested by their surroundings — the home possibly to go 

 on from generation to generation. Our man, if he is to be 

 kept true to his calling and then to be enabled to render 

 his best work possible to Agriculture — as it is the Nation's 

 warm wish and interest that he should be — if he is to be 



