io 



The position u remedying the evil results of ' close ' parishes. It was imnie- 

 since 1870. diately succeeded by the Elementary Education Act of 1870, 

 " for which it undoubtedly paved the way. That Act for a 

 "short time powerfully affected the agricultural labourers' 

 " position by restricting juvenile labour and diminishing the 

 " aggregate amount of the family earnings." These changes 

 paved the way for the agitation of the early " seventies," when 

 for a time capital and labour on the farm organised their 

 forces and came into open, and in some districts bitter, conflict. 

 From this period dates a change in the relationship of 

 masters and men. Agricultural labour attained economic 

 freedom, and if it did not acquire at once quite the same degree 

 of mobility as industrial labour, it became, in the economic 

 sense, fluid. Henceforward the old familiar semi-patriarchial 

 relationship, under which the labourer was partly bullied and 

 partly petted, was replaced by a more commercial spirit, and 

 the tie between master and man became almost exclusively a 

 " cash nexus." The use of labour-saving machinery spread 

 from the pioneers to the main body of farmers, woman labour 

 was largely diminished, child labour practically disappeared, 

 and a general levelling up of the standard of efficiency pressed 

 hardly upon the casual labourers and the " odd men " of the 

 villages. 



At this time in the " seventies '' farming was prosperous, 

 the value of land was at its maximum (the assessment of 

 kk lands " under Schedule A. in Great Britain, which is now 

 42,000,000, was then nearly 60,000,000), wheat sold at an 

 average never below 455. per quarter, and in the earlier years 

 of the decade ranged between 555. and 60s. But at the end 

 of the decade the storm burst, and from 1879 onwards British 

 agriculture entered upon a new era. Farmers in their struggle 

 with adversity naturally attempted to curtail their labour bill, 

 and became more exigent in their demands upon their men. 

 On both sides the old easy-going attitude disappeared. Masters 

 became more exacting, and men less amenable. Under these 

 circumstances it might have been expected that the differences 

 between capital and labour would have led to a renewal, with 

 even greater intensity, of the fight over wages which char- 

 acterised the early " seventies." This, however, has not been 

 the case. Small local contests there may have been, but, 

 generally speaking, there seems to have been on both sides a tacit 

 understanding that no substantial or violent change in the level 

 of farm wages was within the field of discussion. Wages have 

 of course fluctuated, though within narrow limits, and slowly 

 but steadily there has been all along a tendency in the direc- 

 tion of increase. It appears from a paper on Agricultural 

 Wages during the past 50 Years, read before the Royal Statis- 

 tical Society by Mr. Wilson Fox,* that the increase in total 



* Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Vol. LXVL, 1903. 



